Experience and meaning in music performance
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Experience and meaning in music performance |
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Mark Doffman
I am one of four doctoral research students in the EMMP project. My area of research is directed towards understanding how jazz musicians experience and make sense of performed musical time; in particular I am fascinated by the idea of groove, that dynamic coherence in the playing that is held up by many musicians as an aesthetic ideal. This research has been in part motivated by my own playing experiences. As a jazz drummer, I have worked with many musicians on the British jazz scene over a twenty year period. I have long been intrigued by the feeling of when group timing is working and when not, the power of those feelings, and the difficulty of articulating those felt timing patterns. In 2005, initially motivated by the desire to write a book about practising, I completed a Master’s degree in music psychology at University of Sheffield where my dissertation was supervised by Eric Clarke. This dissertation examined the micro-timing relations between bass and drums in a jazz setting, and attempted to situate this relationship within a broader examination of the jazz rhythm section. My current research is focused on understanding more about this ‘mutual tuning-in’; how do musicians make sense of this extraordinarily subtle timed behaviour? What is the relationship between groove and timing? Given that the feeling of groove is a highly personal one, is it possible to make sense of the timed and social interactions that appear to contribute to this feeling? Within ethnomusicology, a number of writers have examined musical interaction within jazz performance, notably Charles Keil, Joseph Progler, Ingrid Monson and Peter Reinholdsson, all of whom in different measure, have paid some attention to groove (also referred to as ‘swing’) as a feature of interaction. Such studies have highlighted certain notions of groove - its motional effects (bobbing heads, tapping feet), its temporal character and its rather ephemeral nature; building on some of these studies but also drawing on entrainment theory, and ideas on music as part of an intersubjective world, my own work attempts to understand groove as it provides access to both private and shared levels of experience and as a bridge between individual timing and musical sociability.
Mark Doffman
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