Groove: An Aesthetic Of Measured Time: Historical Materialism, Volume 73

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.