“ F o r d ec a d es , p h i l o s o p h er s a n d th eo r i s ts o f mu s i c ha ve b een p ro mi s i n g a n e mb odied phe nome nol og y of m us i c . T i g e r C. R oho l t’ s Groove i s a n o r i g i n a l a n d i n s i g h tfu l es s a y th a t ma kes g o o d o n th a t p ro mi s e. R o h o l t c h a l l en g es a n a l y ti c a n d q u a n ti fi c a ti o n a l a p p r o a c h es to rh y th mi c n u a n c e a n d a rg u es th a t g ro o ves a r e n o n - c o n c ep tu a l , fel t, a n d u n d ers to o d th ro u g h b o d i l y en g a g emen t. F u l l o f s ma r t mu s i c a l ex a mp l es a n d s o u n d a rg u men ts , Groove i s mu c h mo re th a n j u s t a b o o k o n r h y th m o r d ru mmi ng . I t i s a c o rn ers to n e fo r a n y fu tu r e p h en o men o l o g y o f mu s i c . ” BR IAN KANE , Associate Professor of Music, Yale University, USA and author of On Music and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music “F e a t u ring elegant, lucid , a nd a c c e s s i b l e p r os e , Groove u n d ers c o res h o w mu s i c a l n o ti o n s –wh eth er a es th eti c , a ffec ti ve, p erc ep tu a l , o r p h i l o s o p h i c a l — c a n o n l y b e ex p l a i n ed fu l l y wi th r es pec t to b o d i l y ex p er i en c e. T h i s i ma g i n a ti ve b o o k i s c h a l l en g i n g , p ro vo c a ti ve, th o ro u g h l y a r g u ed , a n d s p a rkl i n g wi th i n ter d i s c i p l i n a r i ty . ” C H AR LE S H IROS HI GAR R ET T , A ssoc iat e Pr of e ssor , Music ology, U niv e r sit y of M i c hi gan, U SA and editor of the Grove Dictionary of American Music , 2nd ed. Bard Col l ege. U S A TIGER C . R OH OLT i s Asso cia t e Pr o f esso r o f Ph ilo so p h y a t M o n t cla ir St a t e Univ ersit y , U S A and i s au th o r o f Key Terms in Philosophy of Art (Blo o m sb u r y Acad emi c , 2 0 1 3 ) . PHILOSOPHY/MUSIC www.bloomsbury.com Cover design by Clare Turner Cover image © Tansy Spinks/ Millennium Images Also available from Bloomsbury tiger c. roholt “ T i g er C . R o h o l t’ s en erg eti c n ew s tu d y o f a n eg l ec t ed b u t u n d en i a b l y c en tra l a s p ec t o f rh y th m rep res en ts a ma j o r s tep fo r wa r d i n u n d ers ta n d i n g h o w a n d wh y mu s i c mo ves u s a s i t d o es . R o h o l t wr i tes b o th a s a p h i l o s o p h er a n d a s a p l a y er, wh i c h r ea d er s wi l l q u i c kl y s ee i s a g rea t a d va n ta g e o n th i s to p i c , a n d h e kn o ws th e va l u e o f ex a mp l es , ma n y o f wh i c h a re th o ro u ghly absorbing i n the i r ow n r i g ht. R ohol t d e s cri bes th e mo to ri n ten ti o n a l p ro c es s th a t a c tu a l i z es th e i mp l i c i t g r o o ve o f a s o n g , g i vi n g u s a n ew a p p rec i a ti o n o f th e emb o d i ed c h a r a c ter o f th i s ki n d o f a es th eti c ex p eri en c e a n d th e ‘ g r o o ve- c o mp l eti n g ’ r o l e o f th e l i s ten er. A wo n d erfu l l y i n teres ti n g s tu d y . ” G AR R Y L . HAGBER G , James H . O ttaway Jr. Professor of Philosophy and Ae st he t ic s, a phenomenology of rhythmic nuance “ E x p l o ri n g u n c h a rted p h i l o s o p h i c a l ter r i to r y , T i g er C . R o h o l t’ s s ma rt, th o ro u g h a c c o u n t o f g r o o ve p u s h es u s to r eth i n k th e n a tu re o f mu s i c a n d mu s i c a l en g a g emen t. E x p er i en c i n g mu s i c i s n o t merely a ma tter o f h o w i t s o u n d s , b ec a u s e h o w i t s o u n d s c a n b e a fu n c ti o n o f h o w i t feel s . ” THEODORE GRACYK , Professor of Philosophy, Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA This is a portion of the Introduction to Tiger C Roholt’s Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) Introduction It’s winter. A heavy snow has fallen. he plows have yet to clear the street on which you’re driving but the snow has been packed down by the early morning traic. As you change lanes you slide just a bit, then you feel your tires settle into the grooves made by the tires of other cars. You have some sense of the irmness and path of these grooves— less by actually seeing them, more through your body. You perceive, or grasp, these grooves both in your hands, through the resistance of the steering wheel, and in your body, as you feel the car being pulled, pushed, and carried along. In a musical groove, a musician, dancer, or an engaged listener has a similar feeling of being pulled-into a musical “notch,” guidedonto a musical “track,” buoyed by a rhythm, being lited up and carried along. Drummers, other musicians, vocalists as well, go to great lengths not only to accurately perform one rhythmic pattern or another but to perform rhythms in such a way that they acquire various qualities of groove, speciic qualities of “pushing,” “pulling,” “leaning forward,” being “laid-back,” being “in the pocket,” and so on. Musicians achieve this by playing certain notes ever-so-slightly early or ever-so-slightly late (in addition to subtleties of dynamics, timbre, etc.). Loosely speaking, a groove is the feel of a rhythm. Pretheoretical intuitions here are four pretheoretical intuitions that can be teased out of the common conception of groove, employed by musicians and music enthusiasts—and they are good ones! In order for my account of groove to be acceptable to those who know grooves well, I believe 9781441166272_txt_print.indd 1 19/06/2014 14:31 2 Groove I must make sense of these intuitions. First, as I have already indicated, grooves have a feel; to put this another way, a groove has a conspicuous afective dimension. In fact, most musicians will say that the feel of a groove is its dominant aspect (one way to highlight its dominance is to notice that when a drummer attempts to perform a groove, she determines whether or not she has succeeded by how it feels). he second intuition is that grooves somehow involve the body and its movement. Where there are grooves, you will ind musicians, listeners, dancers moving their bodies. he third intuition has to do with what it means to understand a groove. To “get” a groove (to understand it) is not to apprehend it intellectually, in terms of a set of propositions or concepts; rather, to understand a groove just is to feel it. he fourth intuition combines those above: feeling a groove, and understanding it, does not occur in thought, nor in listening alone, but through the body. Preview In the following chapters I aim to clarify these intuitions and to argue in favor of them. Although we are many methodological twists and turns away from arriving at an articulation of my inal view, here is a preliminary, rough sketch. here are two aspects to groove: (a) the music (whatever it is that musicians do to create a groove, which has primarily to do with timing nuances); and (b) the felt dimension (the feel of a “leaning” groove or one that “pushes,” “pulls,” and so on). I conceive of my project as an attempt to do justice to both aspects, and to ofer a way of understanding the ways in which these aspects are related. Initially, it may seem that the two aspects go together quite straightforwardly; clarifying the irst clariies the second, in the following way. A drummer performs a rhythm with timing nuances; someone who listens to that performance has an experience 9781441166272_txt_print.indd 2 19/06/2014 14:31 Introduction 3 that includes a certain feeling that is, in some sense, caused by what the drummer does. his is not entirely incorrect, but the relation is far from simple—this is where nearly everything interesting hides (much rides on what we say about “in some sense”). Notice that the auditory stimulus created by a drummer is not a simple stimulus that everyone hears in the same way (see 2.1). Grasping a groove is not a straightforward, perceptual task. It is quite unlike holding up a lime green sweater, for example, which anyone who is not colorblind easily identiies as lime green. Music enthusiasts and musicians are familiar with a thought-provoking common occurrence: one person hears a groove in a recording where another does not. In fact, this perceptual variability is something of a musician’s pet peeve. It is just the kind of perplexity that a philosophical examination is expected to resolve!1 I will claim that one can perceive the irst aspect of groove (the music with nuances) analytically or engagedly. To perceive something analytically means, roughly, to scrutinize an element of a perception in a way that results in detaching that element from its context (see 2.3). If the music is approached analytically, then the second aspect of groove, the feel, remains out of reach. Everything turns on specifying what it means to perceive the music in an engaged manner. Clarifying what I mean by perceiving engagedly requires uncovering a cluster of active, perceptual, bodily capacities and skills that are involved in experiencing grooves, the set of which I later call “the facility for groove” (2.7). Making sense of this facility requires a consideration of perceptual indeterminacy, which I ofer in Chapter 2, and it also involves a consideration of the role of the body, which I consider in Chapters 3 and 4. To pique your interest in the later chapters, in the next two paragraphs, I’ll ofer a preview of what I will say about the relationships among: (a) understanding a groove; (b) the feel of a groove; and (c) the role of body movement in both. I will claim that hearing, grasping, understanding, “getting” a groove requires actual body movement. We grasp a groove through 9781441166272_txt_print.indd 3 19/06/2014 14:31 4 Groove our bodies. We cannot grasp a groove by means of the intellect, by learning certain propositions, principles, or concepts. And we cannot grasp a groove in passive, auditory perception alone, through mere listening. his grasping involves listening (of course) but it also involves a kind of active, practical, non-theoretical knowing. We come to understand grooves by moving. Consider this case: if you know how to use a computer keyboard properly, that knowledge is not conceptual, propositional knowledge but a practical knowledge which is activated only in the moving of your ingers. You grasp the location of the keys on a keyboard through the movement of your ingers. Similarly, as I have suggested, you grasp particular, wintery road conditions through the movement of your hands on the steering wheel, and frankly, in the seat of your pants. Along these lines, we understand a groove through our bodily movement. I said above that feeling a groove just is to “get” it. To put this in a slightly diferent manner, understanding a groove means to feel the coherence of its various rhythmic elements. A bit more about the feel of a groove: I will argue that the nature of this feel is not merely a qualitative property of auditory perception, nor merely a proprioceptive or kinesthetic experiential property. What, then, is the nature of the feel of a groove? I will claim that the feel of a groove is an instance of the afective dimension of what the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls “motorintentionality.” Phenomenologists use the term “intentional” to mean our directedness toward something. In certain body movements, our bodily directedness toward objects can constitute a kind of practical, noncognitive understanding of them. his is what we were considering in the previous paragraph. I have a practical understanding of the shape and limsiness of this Coke can, for instance, by means of my ingers and thumb. Notice that our motor-intentional understanding of something can be efective or inefective (it is normative). A faulty understanding may result in my not succeeding in picking up 9781441166272_txt_print.indd 4 19/06/2014 14:31 Introduction 5 the Coke; the can may slip from my hand, spill. Now, we experience this wrongness and rightness of our bodily understanding as bodily feelings of tension, equilibrium, and so on. his, then, is the afective dimension of motor-intentionality, motor-intentional feel. I am going to argue that the embodied understanding of a groove, on the one hand, and the feel that informs this motor-intentional activity, on the other, are two sides of the same coin: to “get” a groove just is to comprehend it bodily and to feel that comprehension. When the irst aspect of groove (the music) is perceived engagedly, the second aspect of groove (the feel) emerges in experience for free, so to speak. Again, everything turns on correctly explicating what it means to perceive a groove engagedly. To those who possess the facility for the grooves of a given genre, the music-to-feel relationship seems automatic. his is because the facility for groove is hidden, which is one reason the phenomenon of groove can seem so mysterious. Here is a reason to believe that something like a facility for groove exists and is hidden. Consider someone who possesses a facility for (say) hip-hop grooves. What happens when that person encounters a particular country music enthusiast who, let’s say, does not grasp hip-hop grooves? For this country music enthusiast, the music-to-feel relationship does not exist for hip-hop; the rhythms and timing nuances simply do not make experiential sense. What can the hip-hop enthusiast say or do to help the country music enthusiast grasp, feel a hip-hop groove? Most music lovers have experienced this sort of demoralizing communicative dead end. Pointing out crucial, nuanced diferences in music-theoretic terms is oten insuicient (more on this point in Chapters 1 and 2). here is something about the music you love that you simply cannot explain to someone who just doesn’t get it. here is some expertise, skill or capacity that the hip-hop enthusiast possesses which this country music enthusiast does not. his facility for groove is hidden in the sense that you don’t notice it until you ind yourself in this sort of 9781441166272_txt_print.indd 5 19/06/2014 14:31 6 Groove communication breakdown. To approach this from the perspective of musical ontology, I argue that grooves are present only schematically and incompletely in recordings and performances—grooves must be revealed, then leshed-out by active, embodied engagement (4.5). Additional questions such as the following will propel our examination. What is the relationship between a groove and a rhythm? Are grooves inefable? What does a musician do to generate or contribute to a groove? Can a listener engage with music in a way that makes it unlikely that she will experience a groove? Are grooves features of musical works? Are there grooves in classical performances? Are there grooves in classical musical works? Why write about groove? Because it is interesting! In addition, a number of answers to this question will emerge throughout the book, but here are three plain answers. First, a groove is an essential feature of music in many genres. In genres such as jazz, hip-hop, pop, and rock, a groove is the glue that holds together a recording or performance, a central element around which musicians coalesce. In order to understand and evaluate such performances and recordings, we must be able to describe and discuss this feature clearly. All too oten, discussions of grooves are vague and misleading. Second, relatedly, an efective theory of groove will aid in communication—not only among musicians but between musicians and others, such as critics, music enthusiasts, recording engineers, producers, managers, music attorneys, record label executives, and others. Further, seeking to elucidate groove turns out to bear fruit in clarifying other phenomena as well. Many of the claims I lesh out and support will illuminate not only groove but also aspects of aesthetic experience, the perception of music, as well as other, similar emergent qualitative phenomena 9781441166272_txt_print.indd 6 19/06/2014 14:31 Introduction 7 in music and art. I will have quite a bit to say about musical nuances in general (aka expressive variations), and will have occasion to consider guitar timbre, emergent qualities of musical intervals, and even certain emergent qualities in visual art. Finally, examining the kind of temporal, embodied knowing that is at the core of groove can’t help but be suggestive for elucidating other temporal, embodied activities as diverse as punching a speed bag, running on a treadmill, and having sex. Method hroughout the book, I invoke the ideas of philosophers, psychologists, music theorists, musicians, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists in order to explore possible paths of clarifying the relevant phenomena, and to point out where certain paths lead to dead ends, explaining why, and so on. We will have occasion to consider the work of Diana Rafman, Vijay Iyer, Daniel Dennett, Charles Keil, Eric Clarke, Justin London, heodore Gracyk, Richard Shusterman, Stephen Davies, Roman Ingarden, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. I ofer some interpretations and critiques of these thinkers, but only in the service of the main task at hand. I also draw upon an understanding of groove that I worked with as a musician, which was formed and operative prior to beginning my philosophical examination of the subject. I work my way through the various issues without asking the reader to buy-in to one philosophical orientation or another. For example, although I draw upon the ideas of Merleau-Ponty, and although there is a sort of Heideggerian inluence in the background, the book unfolds in a way that does not require the reader to be familiar with nor accept the approach of existential phenomenology—that approach only begins to appear within answers to problems encountered in Chapters 1 and 2. We get there, but we are drawn there, step-by-step, as we conirm 9781441166272_txt_print.indd 7 19/06/2014 14:31 8 Groove just how useful certain ideas from phenomenology are for making sense of groove. Biographically speaking, I was pulled toward a phenomenological outlook—away from an outlook situated in AngloAmerican philosophy of mind—by trying to make sense of groove. herefore, it seems to me quite natural that attempting to make sense of this sort of phenomenon leads one toward phenomenology. Only a few thinkers, such as the ethnomusicologists Charles Keil and Steven Feld, have written about groove, as well as the musician and theorist Vijay Iyer. No philosophers have written about groove. For reasons that become clear later, I believe that it is not feasible to build upon these works (although I certainly discuss them). Instead, I begin anew, concretely, by considering a real, musical example (in 1.1). Although he didn’t write about music in any systematic way, the work of the French existential phenomenologist Maurice MerleauPonty looms large in what follows. Merleau-Ponty’s writing is notoriously diicult, so for the reader’s beneit, I will occasionally draw directly from the work of authoritative interpreters of MerleauPonty, quoting at-length from the writing of philosophers such as Taylor Carman, Hubert Dreyfus, Sean D. Kelly, and so on (in some cases, their work reaches beyond mere interpretation of MerleauPonty, and is employed for that purpose). hat said, in many places where I believe it will improve clarity, or where I disagree with an interpreter, I will quote Merleau-Ponty’s texts themselves. In the irst two chapters, I draw from my essay, “Musical Musical Nuance” (which appeared in he Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 2010)2 and “In Praise of Ambiguity: Merleau-Ponty and Musical Subtlety” (which appeared in Contemporary Aesthetics in 2013).3 My irst scule with this subject matter constituted my Ph.D. dissertation, at Columbia (2007), which is very diferent from this book, yet sports a very similar title.4 9781441166272_txt_print.indd 8 19/06/2014 14:31