Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time

by Mark Abel

Overview

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 organizing rhythm—groove. He provides a historical account of its emergence around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses the musical components that make it work.

Drawing on materialist interpretations of art and culture, Mark Abel engages with aesthetic arguments, challenging in particular Adorno's critique of popular music. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608464845
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	02/09/2016
Series:	Historical Materialism , #73
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Mark Abel teaches on the humanities programme at the University of Brighton, UK. He has also worked extensively as music lecturer and jazz educator and is a performing saxophonist and pianist

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Meaning of Musical Time

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