Historically, we can see this happening as the temporal structures of music (how rhythm is organised) change as a result of developments in society. I think it is reasonable to assume that there is a close connection between musical time and social time, and that the way that a society organises the lived experience of time finds its expression in the language of music. Mark: Time is an obvious place to start for a materialist understanding of music because time is a feature of both social life and music. Why do you think time is crucial to understanding music?
Kate: Your argument seems to hinge on how different people experience time, especially people of different classes and historical periods. Other musics might display one or two of these, but not consistently all four. My analysis of groove identifies four characteristics: strict metronomic timing a highly structured meter backbeat – an emphasis on the off-beats of the meter and syncopation. Although all musical ensembles need to be coordinated in time, I argue that groove is unique to the popular music of the twentieth (and twenty-first) century and is not a feature of ‘classical’ music or folk or traditional musics. Mark: ‘Groove’ is a word used by musicians to describe the way that the different layers of music, the various instruments and voices, lock together to produce a tight overall rhythmic feel. Kate: What is your definition of ‘groove music’? In turn, it represents an intensification of an aspect of music – meter – which dates from only a few hundred years before that. In the case of music, what I call ‘groove music’ is so ubiquitous that we are tempted to think that it’s just the way that music is, but it’s important to have a historical picture which can show that groove arises in music around the beginning of the twentieth century, initially in America. Culture also tends to get naturalised so that it seems to most people that things couldn’t be any other way. In studying music, I hold to the Marxist principle that cultural phenomena are shaped by the material practices of the society that produces them. Mark Abel: It is a defence of popular music, but in the first place it is an attempt to explain why the music of our time sounds the way it does. Kate Bradley: Is it fair to say that Groove is a defence of popular music from a Marxist perspective? Could you summarise your argument in brief? Much analysis of modern music focuses on lyrical content, but how can we understand modern musical forms? What relation do they have to the capitalist world in which they’ve developed? To answer these questions Kate Bradley interviewed Mark Abel, author of Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time.
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