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  • Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance by Tiger C. Roholt
  • Scott Gleason
Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance. By Tiger C. Roholt. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. [ix, 175p. ISBN 9781441166272 (hardcover), $100; ISBN 9781441104182 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9781441170774 (e-book), $25.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, discography, index.

Why philosophize about musical groove, a phenomenon whose importance to so many African diasporic musics appears self-evident? Why philosophize as opposed to, for example, specifying with greater precision the qualities of grooves from traditional music-analytical perspectives, or seeking to understand ethnographically groove’s verbal discourses and cultures? In Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance, Tiger C. Roholt intervenes in a contentious [End Page 106] problematic, with groove as his terrain: that of disembodied formalism’s inability to value Afrological musics, let alone to “get” them, to groove. Roholt argues that to comprehend a groove specifically is to feel it, actually to move one’s body, to attend to its “conspicuous affective dimension” (p. 2), and hence the “analytical” specification of grooves’ nuances falsely assumes it can adequately account for their bodily effects (pp. 40 and 51–82), which are their very defining features, the reasons we care about them in the first place. Roholt further utilizes a kind of ad hoc discursive ethnography in building his argument, which acknowledges groove’s status as an Afrological music, leading him to attend carefully to groove as a distinct cultural practice, hence seeking to value it as such.

Where, then, does Roholt’s properly philosophical approach to groove lie? Utilizing the descriptive resources of phenomenology, appeal is made to the first-person introspection of experiences, which are verbally shareable and thus productive of knowledge. Roholt specifically argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of “motor-intentionality” empowers us to address the type of feel grooves convey: to understand a groove is not solely or quite to feel it, but a more nuanced (if I may) and complex concept: “to comprehend it bodily and to feel that comprehension” (p. 5, emphasis original; see also, pp. 93–122). This implies a cycle of recursion: grooves are felt, but, too, our simultaneous understandings of them are also experienced as felt. This argument enables us to mediate concept and experience in music, an ongoing concern in philosophical and theoretical discussions. By placing priority on the feel of a groove, Roholt is able to do justice philosophically to what appears to be most listeners’ primary concern about groove: the feel, the feelings a groove evokes or embodies, and the way a groove makes you move.

Discussion of the feelings or the feel of a musical groove could lead to claims about its ineffability, however. To his credit, Roholt (pp. 27–38) takes this possibility seriously, in the traditional philosophical manner of arguing against it. His argument takes the form of a critique of Diana Raffman’s cognitivist account of musical ineffability (in Language, Music, and Mind [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993]), which argues that musical nuances do not admit of cognitive representation—conceptualization and recall—and are thus inexpressible verbally. (Raffman specifically limits her discussion to the pitch domain [ibid., pp. 7–8]; Roholt is concerned primarily with musical temporality.) The tenor of Raffman’s analytic account is far from mystical (as is often implied by continental discussions of musical ineffability), and yet she does argue musical nuances are ineffable. Roholt argues, via his ad hoc ethnography and appeal to intuition and common experience, that musicians nonetheless find ways to communicate regarding desired musical nuances (pp. 22–26). A bass player tells a drummer to “drive harder” during the pre-chorus, to “relax into” a hypermetrically strong beat. These metaphors address microtimings nonanalytically—indirectly—and yet they are verbal expressions. The nuances of musical grooves are thus effable.

Roholt’s discourse writes against a complex disciplinary problematic, mediating music studies (music theory and analysis), philosophy (phenomenology and analytic philosophy), (music) cognition, ethnography (ethnomusicology), and even critical race theory. Interesting here are the limits and pressures this interdisciplinary problematic places on the possibility of a phenomenology of groove. For example, an ethnomusicological optic sensitizes us to Roholt’s implicit ethnographic claims regarding what band members and...

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