‘Show Yourself More Human…’: An Exploration of Agency in the Essercizi per Gravicembalo by Domenico Scarlatti

Discussions of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas are scaturient with agential metaphors; scholars invoke crowds, instrumentalists, street-performers, and live improvisation. Indeed, the sonatas are described as if they possess a personality, which is sometimes superimposed onto the composer himself, or are alive with human activity. Whilst scholars are conscious of the vivid imagery so often used, few tackle the subject from the perspective of intra-musical agency or consider why the sonatas seem so human.
Drawing on theories of agency and music cognition I set out how the sonatas evoke human activity through musical topics and how musical gestures can replicate physical movement. To this end I propose that certain motivic figures can be conceived of as schema of acrobatic motion, capturing a physical phenomenon within music. I also investigate how the structure of individual sonatas can evoke a musical agent navigating a virtual world, and how musical tension can replicate human emotion.
To explore why the sonatas seem alive, I examine how figures within the sonata seem to be spontaneous, and suggest that we perceive the unpredictable musical gestures to be the actions of a musical agent. Ultimately, however, music is brought into existence by a performer, and so I consider the role of the performer and how they embody the tensions implied within the musical work. I conclude with a historical overview of the sonatas and consider the significance of their physicality.