ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a cross-disciplinary summary review of literature that addresses the source of the intentions that we imagine to motivate those interacting bodies. It explores the notion of "agency" and examines what this concept offers to a discussion of the dynamic social forces that we notice in musical experience. The chapter argues that agency can help us explain the experience of interactivity, which is characteristic of musical engagement. The notion of agency surfaces in various guises across different disciplines—in music psychology, educational philosophy, sociology, musicology, and the cognitive sciences. The chapter looks at the relationship between actions deriving from at least two different sources: that between the listening subject and musical subject and the empirically accessible interaction between either co-performing musicians or performing musicians and audiences. It provides a cross-disciplinary gloss for agency. But the variety of meanings and connotations attributed to agency do more to obscure than to reveal when applied to the complex phenomenon of musical experience.
