The Journal of Aesthetic Education

Musicians of all sorts talk of getting “into a groove,” whether using those words or others; musical listeners also talk about the groove of a passage of music, a performance, or a recording. In his four-chapter essay, Groove, Tiger Roholt offers answers to questions that seem obvious candidates for philosophical inquiry yet that few philosophers have even touched on: what is a groove, exactly, and what is it to perceive or understand—to get— a groove? His answers are intriguing, not just because they are thoughtfully argued positions on an important yet neglected topic, but because, if correct, they challenge some central orthodoxies of philosophy of music, at least in the analytic tradition.

Roholt’s main metaphysical thesis is that a groove has two central aspects, one that we might (although Roholt does not) call an objective feature of the music, the other a subjective feature of a competent listener’s experience of the objective feature. The objective aspect comprises the “rhythmic nuances” of the book’s subtitle. (I will get to the subjective aspect below.) These nuances are sometimes glossed by Roholt as “what a musician does to create a groove” (133), although presumably the musical product of the musician’s actions, rather than the actions themselves, is the objective aspect of a groove. More specifically, what a musician does to create a groove is to play certain elements of a rhythm slightly early or late with respect to the metrical framework implicit in a passage of music. For instance, in a standard 4/4 rock meter, the drummer plays a “backbeat” on the snare on beat three. But a good drummer can control whether she plays that backbeat exactly in time, or slightly early or late. Such musical effects are called “nuances” because they are in some sense ineffable. One symptom of this ineffability is that there is no way to record such variations in standard musical notations. In Chapter 1, Roholt distances himself from the most sophisticated extant theory of musical nuances— that defended by Diana Raffman in her 1993 book Language, Music, and Mind—by arguing that this ineffability is not as deep as Raffman claims.¹ He concedes Raffman’s basic picture of our cognitive resources and their limitations: we simply can’t develop a distinct concept for (nor, hence, directly name) every rhythmic nuance we can perceptually distinguish, just as we can’t develop a distinct concept for every color we can perceive. However, Roholt argues (following others) that we have other ways of communicating about such nuances. We use metaphors and other indirect linguistic tools, describing certain grooves as “laid back” or “forward leaning,” and, at least recently, we characterize [End Page 115] grooves by pointing to similarities and differences between our target groove and those to be found on a huge array of recordings. The upshot is that rhythmic nuances are “effable enough for practical purposes” (40).

I’m not sure how deep a departure this is from Raffman’s view. After all, it’s implausible (nor does Roholt argue) that the metaphors we use to describe grooves will be sufficient to communicate the distinctions we perceive; and appeal to recordings with similar grooves is simply a form of ostension, which Raffman acknowledges as our “only hope for communication” of musical nuances.² Anyway, Roholt’s main aim in engaging with Raffman is to argue that she ignores the very point of most musical nuances. Theorizing about the Western classical tradition, Raffman argues that musical nuances often serve to highlight a performative interpretation of an (effable) musical structure. Roholt plausibly argues that such uses of musical nuance are the exception, that the point of most musical nuance, evident in Western popular music and perhaps most forms of music around the world, is a perceptual effect, grooves naturally serving as his central kind of example. Once more, this seems to me more of a difference in focus or emphasis rather than a true disagreement with Raffman. In any case...