Whither Groovology? Rethinking Groove in Music Scholarship

Abstract

Scholarship on groove is an area of scholarly enquiry that is as wide-ranging as it is interdisciplinary, with contributions from music theory, ethnomusicology, psychology, and aesthetics. Generally speaking, groove refers to ways of musicking that are conducive to physical movement, particularly as it relates to how we synchronise our bodies through dancing, finger-snapping, nodding along, and so on. A more precise definition, however, can be elusive. For example, should one understand groove as firstly defined by its musical properties? Or is it an aesthetic concept that is subjective and contingent? Likewise, is groove a cross-cultural analytic that applies to all musics, or is it an emic concept particular to certain genres? The first part of this paper will problematize the ways in which groove has been understood in the scholarly literature. I draw most particularly on Tiger Roholt's phenomenology of groove in order to clarify some of the conceptual confusion around what groove is and what an empirically grounded approach to groove might entail. In the second part of the paper, I make my case by way of an ethnographic survey of a series of instructional videos available on social media, which focus on aspects of rhythm and groove for instrumentalists and dancers. Ultimately, I argue that scholarship should concern itself less with what groove is than it should with the processes by which listeners “get into groove”, that is, the bodily techniques and mediations through which listeners experience groove in intuitive, felt ways.