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Modelling the Groove: Conceptual Structure and Popular Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Lawrence M. Zbikowski
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Abstract

A musical groove is most typically created by a small group of musicians working together, each contributing parts to the whole. Characterizing the knowledge behind such interactive ventures has proved to be challenging. This article attempts to characterize the knowledge basic to grooves first by concentrating on ‘the groove’ as it is practised in soul, rhythm and blues, jazz fusion and various other popular genres, and second by focusing on cognitive knowledge structures called conceptual models. It is argued that musicians rely on such structures to produce grooves, and that listeners make use of similar structures to understand them. Grooves from the music of Eric Clapton, Miles Davis and James Brown are discussed, and conceptual models for each are developed.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 129 , Issue 2 , 2004 , pp. 272 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association (2004)

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References

Research time crucial for the preparation and completion of this article was provided by the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (March 2002) and the National Humanities Center (2003–4); a fellowship at the latter was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am also indebted to students in my 2002 seminar on the analysis of popular music for their helpful discussions of topics central to this article.Google Scholar

1 For instance, Charlie Persip explains a groove as follows: ‘When you get into that groove, you ride right on down that groove with no strain and no pain – you can't lay back or go forward. That's why they call it a groove’ (quoted in Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology, Chicago, 1994, 349). My point is not that musicians or listeners are inarticulate about grooves, but that characterizing the knowledge behind their descriptions is not easy.Google Scholar

2 See Monson, Ingrid, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology (Chicago, 1996), chapters 2 and 5. A typical jazz rhythm section consists of drums, bass and piano or similar ‘comping’ instrument; the term ‘comping’ derives either from ‘accompaniment’ or ‘complement’ (see ibid., 43).Google Scholar

3 Ibid., 190.Google Scholar

4 Naomi Quinn and Dorothy Holland, ‘Culture and Cognition’, Cultural Models in Language and Thought, ed. Holland and Quinn (Cambridge, 1987), 3–40 (p. 4).Google Scholar

5 For my treatment of conceptual models, as well as a discussion of their antecedents, see Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (New York, 2002), chapter 3. The conceptual model, as I construe it, is related to knowledge structures proposed by a number of other researchers in cognitive science and is thus similar to the idealized cognitive model (George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, Chicago, 1987), cognitive domain (Ronald W. Langacker, Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, i: Theoretical Prerequisites, Stanford, 1987; ii: Descriptive Application, Stanford, 1992), frame (Marvin Minsky, ‘A Framework for Representing Knowledge’, The Psychology of Computer Vision, ed. Patrick Henry Winston, New York, 1975, 211–77; idem, The Society of Mind, New York, 1985) and mental model (Philip Nicholas Johnson-Laird, Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness, Cambridge, MA, 1983). (Structures such as these also informed Quinn and Holland's approach to what they came to call cultural models.) From the larger perspective that I develop, musical concepts are a result of processes of categorization, and relationships between musical concepts are derivative of the process of cross-domain mapping. Conceptual models are consequently the first level of organization for concepts.Google Scholar

6 For a rewarding study of more extended knowledge structures see Hutchins, Edwin, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA, 1995). There Hutchins describes in detail the coordinated knowledge that allows the navigation team of a large naval vessel to control the vessel's movements.Google Scholar

7 For the sake of concision I shall speak as though listener and performer were two different individuals. It is clear that this is typically not the case: most performers are engaged in active listening to music, and in many cultural settings the dividing line between listeners (that is, members of the audience) and performers is either unclear or non-existent. I should also note that my use of the notion of a ‘musical work’ is not very heavily freighted, and is intended to apply to the broadest possible range of musical expression.Google Scholar

8 See, in particular, Charles Keil, ‘Motion and Feeling through Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 24 (1966), 337–49; Berliner, Thinking in Jazz, chapter 13; Josef A. Prögler, ‘Searching for Swing: Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm Section’, Ethnomusicology, 39 (1995–6), 21–54; as well as Monson, Saying Something.Google Scholar

9 Although I characterize conceptual models as ‘relatively basic’ and ‘fairly small’, this is only within the context of higher cognitive processes (which is where I prefer to focus). Were we to consider the whole of cognition it would be apparent that conceptual models are hardly basic, and are of a compass that is far from small. For further discussion see Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music, chapters 3 and 5.Google Scholar

10 As will become clear in what follows, I am not concerned here with formal propositions of the sort that are either true or false. My focus is instead on informal propositions that embody beliefs or knowledge. My assumption is that such informal propositions could be rendered as formal propositions (and would then be true or false for some situation), but such an exercise is beyond what I want to accomplish here.Google Scholar

11 By ‘implicit knowledge’ I mean knowledge that is not articulated; ‘explicit knowledge’ is, consequently, knowledge that is articulated. As I construe them, both implicit and explicit knowledge are accessible to consciousness; implicit knowledge is thus not equivalent to unconscious knowledge.Google Scholar

12 See, for instance, Daniel C. Dennett, ‘The Nature of Images and the Introspective Trap’, Content and Consciousness (London, 1969), 132–46; Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1975); Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, Human Problem Solving (Englewood Cliffs, 1972); Zenon W. Pylyshyn, Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA, 1984).Google Scholar

13 See, for instance, Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago, 1987); Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind (New York, 1992); Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, 1999).Google Scholar

14 The theory is presented in Lawrence W. Barsalou, ‘Perceptual Symbol Systems’ and ‘Perceptions of Perceptual Symbols’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22 (1999), 577–609 and 637–60.Google Scholar

15 Connections between perceptual symbols and abstract concepts are discussed in Barsalou, ‘Perceptual Symbol Systems’; idem, ‘Abstraction as Dynamic Interpretation in Perceptual Symbol Systems’, Building Object Categories in Developmental Time, ed. Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe and David H. Rakison (forthcoming); and idem, ‘Abstraction in Perceptual Symbol Systems’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences, 358 (2003), 1177–87. Support for the idea that the musical conception of rhythm is abstracted from proprioceptive information comes from recent neuro-imaging data which shows that musicians do not directly access information about sensorimotor function in their cognition of rhythm. See Lawrence M. Parsons, ‘Exploring the Functional Neuroanatomy of Music Performance, Perception, and Comprehension’, The Biological Foundations of Music, ed. Robert J. Zatorre and Isabelle Peretz, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 0077–8923/930 (New York, 2001), 211–31. A rather different approach that provides a sensorimotor account of rhythm while avoiding the issue of concepts entirely (thus offering an alternative to the view I present) can be found in Neil P. McAngus Todd, Donald J. O'Boyle and Christopher S. Lee, ‘A Sensory-Motor Theory of Rhythm, Time Perception and Beat Induction’, Journal of New Music Research, 28 (1999), 5–28.Google Scholar

16 Trevarthen proposes that within the first weeks of life infants begin to develop a body-moving rhythmic and emotionally modulated system called the Intrinsic Motive Formation (IMF) system. The IMF coordinates and regulates movements and their prospective sensory control, and in the process creates an integrated hierarchy of motor rhythms with varying qualities of expression called the Intrinsic Motive Pulse (IMP). Trevarthen writes: ‘Musicality, the active part of it at least, is the aurally appreciated expression of the activity of the IMF, with the IMP as its agent’ (Colwyn Trevarthen, ‘Musicality and the Intrinsic Motivic Pulse: Evidence from Human Psychobiology and Infant Communication’, Musicae scientae, Special Issue, 1999–2000, 115–215 (p. 160)). See also Colwyn Trevarthen and Kenneth J. Aitken, ‘Infant Inter-subjectivity: Research, Theory, and Clinical Applications’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Disciplines, 42 (2001), 3–48.Google Scholar

17 For a review of the relevant literature and empirical data see London, Justin, ‘Cognitive Constraints on Metric Systems: Some Observations and Hypotheses’, Music Perception, 19 (2002), 534–9.Google Scholar

18 ‘It All Depends’ is not particularly noteworthy within Clapton's career; indeed, perhaps the most memorable song on Behind the Sun (Warner Bros. 9 25166-2) is ‘Forever Man’, which was the only tune on that release to get significant airplay.Google Scholar

19 Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 18.Google Scholar

20 After hearing this example Joti Rockwell suggested that the recording was almost certainly done with a ‘click track’: that is, the musicians coordinated their performance by listening to a series of equally spaced clicks that were prerecorded on one track of the master recording. Once the musicians laid down their various parts the click track was switched off or erased. After listening to the recording with this in mind, I agree: I think it highly likely that the technique was used, for there is a rock-solid consistency to the rhythmic frame of ‘It All Depends’ that does not typically come about by chance. I do not, however, believe that making what is implicit explicit for the purposes of recording argues against the notion of an implicit frame for the groove, for two reasons. First, the click track is used simply to ensure the consistency of the final product – it is not an intrinsic part of the conception of the groove, and would not be used for live performance. Second, the click track is typically undifferentiated, whereas the implicit rhythm is differentiated. This latter point is taken up in more detail below.Google Scholar

21 According to the conceptual model, the first pass through the groove with solo keyboards is also somewhat exceptional (in that there is no bass to anchor the basic syncopations). This would be in keeping with hearing this pass as introductory.Google Scholar

22 Recent metric theory enriches this picture by recognizing relative degrees of strength and weakness among beats: beat 3 of a quadruple metre is reckoned to be stronger than beats 2 and 4, but weaker than beat 1. However, this phenomenon is thought of as a consequence of interacting, hierarchically distinct cycles of strong and weak beats. (The classic study in this connection is Maury Yeston, The Stratification of Musical Rhythm, New Haven, 1976; see also Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, 18–21, and Harald Krebs, Fantasy Pieces: Metrical Dissonance in the Music of Robert Schumann, New York, 1999.) The differentiation between beats with which I am concerned – a differentiation common in dance music, including dances such as the sarabande, mazurka, hambo and Swedish polska – is not addressed by this approach to metre.Google Scholar

23 This spatial metaphor is not, in my experience, worked out in discourse about rock-and-roll rhythm. That is, no one talks about ‘frontbeats’, or further spatializes their characterization of rhythmic relationships in ways distinct from those in which rhythm is generally characterized; for instance, musicians from a wide variety of backgrounds characterize musical events as ‘on’ or ‘off’ the beat, which I take to be a fundamentally spatial conception of beat location.Google Scholar

24 Virgil Thomson, observing the prevalence of syncopation in early twentieth-century dance music, noted ‘A silent accent is the strongest of all accents. It forces the body to replace it with a motion.’ ‘Jazz’, A Virgil Thomson Reader (Boston, MA, 1981), 15–18 (p. 16). My thanks to Alex Ross for leading me to this quotation.Google Scholar

25 Justin London, ‘Cognitive Constraints on Metric Systems: Some Observations and Hypotheses’, Music Perception, 19 (2002), 529–50.Google Scholar

26 The personnel on the recording include Davis on trumpet, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums and John Coltrane on tenor saxophone. The recording session took place on 26 October 1956 in Hackensack, NJ, and appeared on Relaxin' with Miles. It has been re-released under the same name on CD as Prestige OJCCD-190-2. My thanks to Paul Steinbeck for bringing this performance to my attention.Google Scholar

27 The Westminster chimes are more properly called the Westminster Quarters. For a discussion of the pitch successions basic to such chimes, see Harrison, Daniel, ‘Tolling Time’, Music Theory Online, 6/4 (October 2000; <www.societymusictheory.org/mto/issues/mto.00.6.4/toc.6.4.html>).).>Google Scholar

28 The notion that there is one basic harmony per bar fits not only with Garland's introduction, but also with the predominant harmonic pattern set out by Loesser in the original version of the tune. It should be noted, however, that in performance there is a harmonic change –sometimes subtle, sometimes more pronounced – in the second half of almost every bar, which is typical of the way such harmonic patterns are interpreted by the rhythm section.Google Scholar

29 That Davis and the group had rehearsed this introduction is supported, indirectly, by Davis's comment to the engineer just prior to his finger snaps: ‘I'll play it and tell you what it is later.‘ This suggests that Davis and the group knew quite well what the tune was, and how they were going to play it, but that this knowledge had not yet been shared with the technical staff on the recording. Davis also could have clarified the intent of his finger snaps by using a head nod or other gesture to signal the placement of the main beats relative to which his finger snaps were to be understood, but I am not aware of any evidence confirming that he did so.Google Scholar

30 Fred Wesley, on trombone, directed James Brown's band during the early 1970s. ‘Doing it to Death’ was originally released in 1973, and has been re-released on James Brown 40th Anniversary Collection, Polydor CD 31543 3409-2, and on Star Time, Polydor 849 112-2. My thanks again to Paul Steinbeck, who not only brought this recording to my attention but also provided a transcription of the groove, upon which my transcription is based.Google Scholar

31 In his transcription Steinbeck notes that the tempo ranges between 112 and 116 beats per minute over the course of the recording – that is, ± 1.8%.Google Scholar

32 Grouping dissonances of this sort are discussed in greater detail in Krebs, Fantasy Pieces.Google Scholar

33 On the complexity and efficacy of consciousness see Donald, Merlin, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York, 2001). On the relationship between feelings, emotions and consciousness, see Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens.Google Scholar