Filling In: Syncopation, Pleasure and Distributed Embodiment in Groove

DOI: 10.1111/musa.12082 MARIAA.G.WITEK FILLING IN:SYNCOPATION,PLEASURE AND DISTRIBUTED EMBODIMENT IN GROOVE On a live recording of the funk and soul saxophonist Maceo Parker’s ‘Shake Everything YouGot!’ from the album Life on Planet Groove (1992),1 the drummer, Kenwood Dennard, is allocated almost two minutes for his solo. After being accompanied by Parker’s rhythmic stuttering and shouting, Dennard is left to play the groove alone in what is now a classic marker of funk – the drum break.2 Dennard continues in the designated tempo (ca. 120 beats per minute) with a rhythmic pattern which is complex but rarely strays from the track’s regular 4/4 metre. The rhythm is heavily syncopated across the drum kit, but the audience captured on this live recording demonstrates its metrical certainty by clapping hands on every second beat (beats 2 and 4). At two points during the drum break, Dennard syncopates in such a way that beat 4 is entirely omitted, leaving only the audience’s clapping to signify the beat. Here, when the drums are silent, the listeners sound the beat with their body movements. The audience seems to find this deeply satisfying, as indicated by the sound of cheers following Dennard’s return on ‘the One’.3 Thus, even when we are listening to the recording, removed from the jazz club hosting the concert (Stadtgarten, Cologne, 1992), we can gain the same enjoyment of the audience’s momentary embodied expression of the beat. What is it about this scenario that feels so enjoyable? What is the significance of syncopation in groove, and to what extent can it explain the pleasure we experience through physical embodiment and synchronisation in dance- and movement-directed music? In this article, groove is analysed phenomenologically as a triangulation of rhythmic structure, embodiment and pleasure. A consideration of groove research and theories of extended mind and affective practice demonstrate how groove is distributed between mind, body and music. In this distribution, musical pleasure is not simply caused by sensory stimulation; rather, it emerges dynamically through the intertwining of the corporeal, material and psychological. Syncopation provides an example of the structural complexity of groove that opens up empty spaces in the rhythmic surface which invite the body to fill in through entrainment. By filling in temporal gaps, bodies extend into the musical structure, and the desire to fill the gaps and complete the groove affords a participatory pleasure. 138 Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA FILLING IN 139 Groove During the last few decades groove has attracted attention from a number of disciplines, most noticeably ethnomusicology, musicology and psychology. It is therefore surprising that the current definition of groove in the New Grove Dictionary Online, while highlighting some of its most significant aspects – most important, its effects on the body and degree of repetition – accepts some very vague descriptions of the relationship between the structural and the experiential: In the realm of jazz, a [groove is a] persistently repeated pattern. More broadly, Feld (1988), studying groove from an ethnomusicological perspective, defines it cautiously as “an unspecifiable but ordered sense of something that is sustained in a distinctive, regular and attractive way, working to draw the listener in”. Connections to dance are important, and the statement that a performance has, or achieves, a groove, usually means that it somehow compels the body to move. (Kernfeld 2009; emphasis added) Furthermore, it is unclear from this definition what the groove actually consists of. Is it the music itself, a property of the music, the experience of it or our behaviour towards it? Or is it perhaps a special combination of these factors? Together with Charles Keil, Steven Feld was one of the first to study groove as a musical concept. In Music Grooves (1994), they both directed broadly ethnomusicological approaches towards groove in cultures ranging from African American jazz communities to the Kaluli of New Guinea. In their writing, music is treated as an embodied process, and analyses are directed towards performances rather than works. In these analyses groove is found in microtemporal performance nuances, often described as ‘push’ or ‘pull’ against the main pulse, such that some notes slightly anticipate or are played shortly after time points on a strict metric grid.4 Keil coined the term ‘Participatory Discrepancies’ (PDs) to describe such nuances, claiming that small variations in timing promote participation and social interaction on the part of both performer and listener: ‘The power of music is in its participatory discrepancies. [ . ] Music, to be personally involving and socially valuable, must be “out of time” and “out of tune”’ (1987, p. 275). The term ‘engendered feeling’ is also employed, referring to the processual, emergent qualities of affect elicited by PDs in rhythm, qualities felt in the body (Keil and Feld 1994, p. 54). Such participatory views are now common in approaches to musical experience, and few maintain that audiences and listeners are ever passive respondents. Tia De Nora’s (2000) ethnography of aerobics classes and Judith Becker’s (2004) research on trancing, for example, both foreground the notion of human-music interaction. However, it is rare for this interaction to be analysed in detail. For example, Keil and Feld leave us wondering what it is about PDs that afford engendered feeling. What is participatory about the participatory discrepancies? Musicologists and phenomenologists studying groove have also focused on such ‘microtiming’, bringing us closer to clarifying how experience is related Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 140 MARIAA.G.WITEK to the musical structure. In her book on the funk grooves of James Brown and Parliament, Anne Danielsen (2006) treats microtiming as a way of creating forward motion and rhythmic interplay between textural layers. Together with repetition, metric displacement and cross-rhythm, such structures promote a ‘groove mode of listening’ (pp. 147–9), in which time is organised cyclically. While in ‘the state of being in a groove’, listeners are immersed in an ‘eternal present’ and an attentional equilibrium (p. 154). Because the groove is repetitive, listeners’ expectations with respect to events of rhythmic tension do not move forwards and backwards in protension and retention, but are directed inwards to what is happening at that moment in time. This does not mean, however, that groove is static. Inspired by Jacques Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), in which a productive and dynamic kind of repetition is identified, Danielsen (2006, pp. 162–4) describes how the groove is constantly moving; the same structural gestures are simply repeated time and time again. For Danielsen, groove is neither fully within the music nor within the listener, but emerges only in the relationship between the two.5 She distinguishes between figure and gesture, between the imagined and the sounding: the figure is the referential structure, while the gesture is the musical utterance that expresses the figure. A rhythmic pattern notated according to traditional metric categories (i.e. on a metric grid) is the figure, while the rhythmic pattern as performed, with all its articulations and microrhythmic nuances that cannot easily be transcribed, is the gesture. However, the figure is not simply a mental representation, abstracted from the perceived gesture, but a virtual component of it, actualised in its gestural form. In other words, there is always a mutual relationship between reference structure and sounding event, and structure is both virtual and real, in both the listener and the music.6 The relationship between musical structure and listener is equally important in Tiger Roholt’s (2014) more recent phenomenological analysis of groove. As in Keil and Feld’s (1994) work on PDs, it is ‘rhythmic nuance’, the microtemporal sophistication in rhythmic expression, that is the source of groove; Roholt’s arguments thus resemble those surrounding engendered feeling. He claims that, although the timing nuances are important, they must be experienced ‘engagedly’, not ‘analytically’, in order for groove to occur (p. 3). This ‘feeling’ of groove is inseparable from the body that feels it. Groove is to be understood by the body and requires body movement to be actualised. The kind of embodiment that Roholt finds in groove is an instance of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) ‘motor intentionality’, which describes an unconscious yet practical directness towards an object, a bodily knowing that feels more like ‘grasping’ than representing (Roholt 2014, pp. 96–103). According to Roholt, groove is the affective dimension of motor intentionality afforded by the tension between moving with the beat and the deviating rhythmic nuances (p. 105). He concludes that groove is only partly located in a recording, that it is ontologically incomplete and requires listeners’ embodied engagement. © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis, 36/i (2017) Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd FILLING IN 141 Syncopation, Entrainment and Affect While many groove-based genres do indeed involve microtiming (e.g. jazz, funk, R & B and hip-hop), others do not. In particular, some forms of electronic dance music (e.g. house and techno) are not microrhythmically sophisticated in this way, but nonetheless ‘compel the body to move’, involve repetition and generally fit the New Grove definition of groove (Kernfeld 2009). After musicologists and behavioural psychologists had established the basic experiential effect of groove (Iyer 2002; Zbikowski 2004; and Madison 2006), leading to its psychological definition as a musical quality associated with a pleasurable desire to move (Janata, Tomic and Haberman 2012), researchers began examining which musical structures best fit this experience.

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