Mark Abel, University of Brighton
What is the relationship between music and time? How does musical rhythm express our social experience of time? In Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, Mark Abel explains the rise to prominence in Western music of a new way of organising rhythm: groove. He provides a historical account of its emergence around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses the musical components which make it work.
Tracing the influence of key philosophical arguments about the nature of time on musical aesthetics, Mark Abel draws on materialist interpretations of art and culture to challenge those, like Adorno, who criticise popular music’s metrical regularity. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it.
Biographical note
Readership
Table of contents
Chapter 1: What is ‘groove’
Chapter 2: Is groove African
Chapter 3: Bergsonism and unmeasurable time
Chapter 4: Schutz’s ‘vivid present’ and the social time of music
Chapter 5: Adorno and reified time
Chapter 6: Meter, groove and the times of capitalism
Chapter 7: History, modernism, and the time of music
Bibliography
Index
Bibliography 351
Index
