Animating Indeterminate Agency

Abstract

Abstract In his 1988 article “Music as Drama,” Fred Everett Maus argued that the indeterminacy of musical agency—the elusive identity of who acts in musical experience—is a fundamental quality of music-analytical language. Taking this indeterminacy as a challenge, subsequent responses to Maus often posit hierarchical taxonomies to pin down the elusive location of musical agency. In this scholarship, the higher status of human agents, such as analysts, composers, and performers, is continually assumed over that of nonhuman musical agents. However, by treating the ambiguity of musical agency as a problem to be solved with anthropocentric solutions, music theorists have yet to consider the transformative, beyond-human potential in music’s agential indeterminacy. Through situating Maus’s observations in the context of feminist and queer interventions in music theory, this chapter rearticulates musical agency to better illuminate its queer post-humanist potential for imagining our disciplinary world otherwise. To do so, it links music’s erotic agency and animism with the concept of animacy developed by queer theorist and linguist Mel Y. Chen. Resisting the human-centric hierarchy of animacy in linguistics, they point to instances when language subverts the agential status quo as opportunities to rethink who and what matters for biopolitical and ethical ends. Thinking with Chen, this chapter re-contextualizes the purpose of analytical writing beyond knowledge production. Rather, our writing always invites readers to imagine and enact particular worlds. This orientation could invite scholars to write alongside a coalition of minoritized interventions to build more liberatory worlds.