Category: Groove

Follow these links for reviews and discussions of my book Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance. I really appreciate the time these reviewers and writers invested in the book.

• Google Scholar citations
• Journal of Aesthetic Education, review by Andrew Kania (volume 51, number 1, 2017)
• Popular Music, review by Philip Boast (volume 36, issue 2, 2017)
• British Journal of Aesthetics, review by Jeanette Bicknell (volume 56, number 4, 2016)
• Notes, review by Scott Gleason (volume 73, number 1, 2016)
• Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, review by Justin London (volume 74, Issue 1, 2016)
• Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, review by Milan Jilka (volume 2, Issue 1, 2015)
• Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, review by Clément Canonne (2/18/2015)
• Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, review by Daniel Schnee (volume 7, number 2, 2015)
• Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. (March, 2015)
• Under the Radar, by Frank Valish
• Brettworks, by Thomas Brett
• My piece “From the Author’s Perspective…” in the Spring 2015 American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter: 35.1
• Groove back-cover endorsements

I’ve written a fairly lengthy piece—”From the Author’s Perspective: Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance”—which appears in the new American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter. Here is the opening paragraph:

How should we understand the relationship between music and body movement? The common view is that a listener’s body movement is a reaction to, an effect of, perceiving music. I don’t doubt that this is, in part, correct. I claim in Groove, however, that moving our bodies is often something that we do in order to grasp certain rhythmic qualities; our movement is an integral part of a perceptual skill for grasping qualities such as a groove. We know that the perception of music is not passive; I view bodily movement as a component of one’s active perception of music. To develop this, I draw upon the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied perception, emphasizing his notion of motor intentionality. Before we get to this, though, let’s take a few steps back…

Read the rest here:  35.1

One of the ideas I leverage in my book, Groove, is the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motor intentionality.* Phenomenologists use the term “intentional” to refer to our directedness toward something. Merleau-Ponty’s idea is that, in certain movements, our bodily directedness toward objects constitutes a kind of practical, noncognitive understanding of them. (For example, I have a practical rather than intellectual understanding of the shape and flimsiness of this Coke can through the movements of my fingers and thumb.)

It’s commonly believed that a groove is, in some sense, the feel of a rhythm. But the feels of grooves seem somewhat mysteriously embodied. I try to make sense of this through a particular characteristic of motor intentionality. Notice that our motor-intentional understanding of something can be effective or ineffective. (A faulty understanding may result in my not succeeding in picking up the Coke; the can may slip from my hand, spill.) Merleau-Ponty believes we experience this wrongness and rightness of our bodily understanding as bodily feelings of tension, equilibrium, etc. I think that when we move to music we are attempting to understand it, bodily, through our movements.

I argue that this felt, affective dimension of motor intentionality is the basic nature of the feel of a groove. 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.

*For more on motor intentionality, see Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Also see Sean D. Kelly’s “Merleau-Ponty on the Body: The Logic of Motor Intentional Activity,” Ratio XV, no. 4 (2002): 376– 91. For more on Merleau-Ponty in general, see Taylor Carman’s Merleau-Ponty. London and New York: Routledge, 2008.