We need theories that help us join the struggle for alternative futures. Cultural-historical approaches frame agency as something people do rather than something they have or sense. Building on this, I conceptualise agency in terms of the direction and reach of actions. Direction concerns movement from distinctive subject positionings towards desired endpoints. Reach concerns the extent of this movement. Direction and reach can be both outward (transforming the world) and inward (transforming the self). This acknowledges individuals’ contributions to changing their own lives and those of others without evacuating actions from the activities in which they are embedded. Motive, mediation, and motion are key to this. I illustrate these ideas in relation to existing research on young people’s environmental activism, a Latino boy in foster care, and a mother struggling to care for her infant child, as well as examples from prior research and other chapters in this volume.

Studies of agency are crucial if we are to grapple with pressing societal and environmental problems. Relevant conceptual and methodological solutions are needed to make alternative futures possible. This chapter outlines a broad position from which the subsequent contributions to this edited volume depart: one that recognises the urgency of agency and the value of cultural-historical perspectives in breaking away from problematic notions that frame agency as a matter of individuals pitted against the social, or in which individual actions lose their social contingency. Elaborating agency as a matter of struggle where individual and social are in dialectic relations, the chapter focusses on motives, mediation and motion. Within a broader and still-evolving cultural-historical framework, these motifs offer a distinctive way to deal with the challenges of conceptualising and facilitating agency, one which brings alternative futures into the realm of the possible by linking agency with learning and development.

The author details her team’s research investigating sex differences in serial murder from an evolutionary perspective. Per Trivers’ (1972) Parental Investment Theory, evolved psychological mechanisms serve sex-specific interests to maximize reproductive fitness (genes represented in subsequent generations). As predicted, men – who produce millions of sperm daily and have an increased sex drive – commit serial murder primarily for sexual reasons. Women, who have limited reproductive opportunities compared to men, have evolved to place great importance on resources. As such, women commit serial murder primarily for monetary gain. Moreover, mirroring ancestral agrarian tendencies, male serial killers (MSKs) are hunters (stalkers) of victims, and female serial killers (FSKs) are gatherers of profit and “gather” victims in their immediate environment, including relatives. The author stresses that an evolutionary perspective (ultimate perspective) does not explain the entirety of serial murder. We must consider converging perspectives, including evolutionary, proximate biological, clinical, traumagenic, cultural, historical, social, and gender-role forces that contribute to the development and growth of the human psyche.

Matthias Koßler argues that Schopenhauer's theory of character is relevant to the recent revival of the concept in the social sciences. He argues that the theory of character Schopenhauer presented in his later essays is inconsistent with the theory developed in The World as Will and Representation. In the prize essays, Schopenhauer develops the Kantian distinction between intelligible and empirical character, treating the former as an innate, unchangeable metaphysical entity, while in WWR Schopenhauer clearly emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence, even for his metaphysics, so that intelligible character must be thought of in relation to experience. Furthermore, reason itself is an essential component of being human, and rationality involves the possibility of partly resisting the effect of a motive on the will, hindering it from achieving expression in action. Thus, human species character cannot just be a set of fixed properties, but rather a general field of possibilities by means of which we use our rationality to individualize ourselves. In conclusion, Koßler recommends avoiding the Kantian terminology of intelligible versus empirical character that achieves prominence in the prize essays. Instead, we should speak of a general concept of personhood that is necessarily specialized into an individual character.

Expands on aspects of ‘technical sociability’, which is underpinned by principles of reciprocity and periodicity, both involving forms of binary organization. These include what I dub the gracious riposte, a recurring behavioural pattern in which assertive and conciliatory gestures are juxtaposed. The commonly applied language model, involving the interpretation of music as ‘conversational’, is reviewed, and I also discuss the rise of the sharply memorable musical motive in the music of this time. This leads to a section on thematic interaction, whereby musical materials themselves, rather than players or instruments, may be heard to ‘converse’ with each other. Sometimes, though, the contrast between them suggests less a fruitful exchange than simple incompatibility. I then consider topic theory as a means of controlling our impressions of such diversity of musical materials, noting both its positive and its limiting aspects. To conclude, I consider the encompassing term ‘variety’, a desideratum of the time, which could, once more, be accounted a virtue or a vice.

In Chapter 5, the Six Little Piano Pieces of Op. 19 are portrayed as a step in the direction of clear and traditional musical form, and more audible motivic processes, after the more abrupt forms and less obvious motivic relations (though far from non-existent) of Op. 11, No. 3, and Erwartung. I describe Pieces No. 2, 3, and 6 in detail, showing that these miniatures are organized by the same frameworks, “musical idea” and “basic image,” as previous works analysed in the book. Piece No. 2 manifests a musical idea that grows out of a conflict between hexatonic, octatonic, and whole-tone subsets, in which the hexatonic emerges victorious over the other two. Piece No. 3 expresses an “idea” of the same kind, but at the last minute the hexatonic collection’s ability to synthesize is thwarted by diatonic subsets. And piece No. 6, the famous portrayal of Mahler’s funeral bells, portrays an image of Schoenberg reaching up to take Mahler’s mantle as tonal composer, but falling back down into first pandiatonic territory and then chromaticism.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the second and third Piano Pieces of Op. 11 form a cycle together with the first, in that they take up motives, harmonies, and processes that were introduced in the first piece, and use them to create narratives of conflict, elaboration, and solution – “musical ideas.” Op. 11’s processes include an expansion of pitch intervals within motives that generalizes into an expansion of pitch-class intervals within set classes, and an “explanatory” process that shows how unfamiliar pitch-interval collections can be reconciled to familiar motives through set-class identity with them. In Op. 11, No. 2, a conflict between set classes and motives similar to the one found in Op. 11, No. 1, is elaborated and resolved using the “explanatory” process, among other devices. In Op. 11, No. 3, the expanding and explanatory processes exist side by side in conflict, but rather than coming together in a solution, the expanding process simply crowds out the explanatory one, so that the “musical idea” is incomplete. My analysis of Op. 11, No. 3, pushes back against the common notion of the piece as “athematic,” in that it portrays the piece as a battle of motivic processes.

The introductory chapter begins by offering a rebuttal to Ethan Haimo’s claim in Schoenberg's Transformation of Musical Language (Cambridge, 2006) that “atonal” is an inappropriate term for Schoenberg's middle-period music. It does so by presenting Schenkerian analyses of “Jesus bettelt,” Op. 2, No. 2, and the first Piano Piece, Op. 11, demonstrating that the traditional contrapuntal structures of tonal music are present in the first piece, though often harmonized with unusual chords, but are incomplete or non-existent in the second piece. The chapter then proceeds to show how features originally characteristic of tonal music, other than typical Schenkerian middlegrounds, play crucial roles in organizing Op. 11, No. 1 – traditional tonal form, as well as motivic and harmonic processes that manifest and elaborate the “musical idea,” a conflict-elaboration-solution narrative.