Given the success achieved by the first edition, I am moving forward with a second question:
N.B. I pose these questions not (only) for the purpose of bothering you, but because, even if posed in a bizarre manner, these questions actually generate no small amount of perplexity among students.
What is groove? In other words: what is it that makes, for example, a double bassist performing a walking bass—essentially a sequence of quarter notes (without embellishments, etc.)—have a greater rhythmic drive than another?
But, returning to being semi-serious, I was thinking that, since "drive" or whatever you want to call it cannot be identified with absolute precision (on the contrary; otherwise a MIDI file would have more pull than Ray Brown), is it not possible that the most gifted performers produce slight variations in tempo, which are not random, but rather comparable to curves?
In the sense that they imperceptibly (and unconsciously) accelerate and decelerate according to "curves" that capture the listener's attention. And that these curves have their own natural development.
For example, if a quartet performs a rallentando or an accelerando without a conductor, if the musicians did not follow some kind of numerical progression, they would never be able to play together. Let's say that a consequentiality is created in the distance between each note and the next (perhaps I am not expressing myself well in strictly mathematical terms); an analogous phenomenon could occur in the case of those musicians who, indeed, have more groove than others. Do you think I should stop doing drugs?
and it is in a certain sense "established" that the listeners' perception of time is in a certain sense linked to the performer's perception of time. Let me explain better... in the discussion of "temporalities," that is, that type of non-metronomic but perceived time, we can speak of the performer's temporality, the score's temporality, and the listener's temporality. It is as if they were temporal "bubbles," small virtual environments in which time functions in a certain precise way.
These temporalities can be divergent. We can have a score with a very rhythmic temporality; I don't know, let's take the third movement of Vivaldi's Autumn. We can have a group of performers who decide to render this temporality differently, slowing it down and "changing it." We can have a person in the audience who, for unknown reasons, is getting extremely bored and perceives everything even slower.
When, for unknown reasons, the performer manages to drag the audience into their own temporality, then that effect of a grand collective ritual and explosive success occurs. I believe there are "ways" to achieve this result. Generally, obsessive rhythms are successful because they directly hit our movement centers and do not allow us to lose attention (or rather, they allow us to relax while continuing to move, i.e., disconnecting the conscious part as if in a trance). When rhythmic imprecisions, diminutions, or variations are applied to these obsessive rhythms, a kind of playful effect is created in which the listener will try to predict where the next beat or the next strong accent will be. This game of anticipation and the unexpected is typical of much highly rhythmic music, from Ockeghem to Beethoven.
So, simple and obsessive rhythm to capture the body; small unexpected variations to capture the mind.
