Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 How Do We Groove as Performers in Classical Music? Josiah Tayag Catalan Music 223: Topics in Ethnomusicology (Groove Studies) June 13, 2018 1 Josiah Tayag Catalan Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan How Do We Groove as Performers in Classical Music? One central question for the last ten weeks that we have been asking and attempting to answer in our graduate seminar is “what is groove?” In Petr Janata’s article, he lists a number of definitions to formulate his study that are all relative to how we think of groove. In music theory and musicology, it may refer to “rhythmic properties or pieces of music and/or the timing relationships of actions of individuals interacting with the music.” Another definition offered was “wanting to move some part of the body in relation to some aspect of the sound pattern.”1 Throughout the quarter, we were able to identify that these definitions were common associations with how people experience groove. Taking these two definitions were useful in helping me formulate my study on groove as a member of the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra (UCDSO). Over the quarter, we investigated groove in dance-based music where in some cases, scholars such as Mark Abel and Vijay Iyer argue that practices in classical music, such as tempo flexibility, make the music absent of groove qualities. Is classical music inherently not groovy? Janata’s listed definitions of groove give a point of departure for my research because of its general nature. Obviously, groove does not operate the same way in classical music than it does in jazz or western popular music, but as a musician I felt groove that was related to the rhythmic properties of the pieces we played and I often felt compelled to move my body in relationship to the sound pattern. Groove is a verb as much as it is a noun. It may refer to an action or a set of actions in performance, or allude to a state of consciousness. In this paper I am interested in how these groove states or actions operates in an orchestral setting, and how individuals conceptualized or experienced groove in their own performance practice. Throughout the paper, I will discuss and describe selected repertoire, the ensemble I participated in for the 1 Janata, Petr, Stefan T. Tomic, and Jason M. Haberman, "Sensorimotor Coupling in Music and the Psychology of the Groove," (Journal of Experimental Psychology), 1-2. 2 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan 2018 Spring quarter, and describe and discuss the subjects I interviewed in the orchestra. I will then examine the responses that the subjects had stated in interviews and discuss my own personal experiences and observations of the subjects as we performed together in the UCDSO. Description of Ensemble and Subjects The UC Davis Symphony Orchestra contained upwards of sixty members that made up the string, woodwinds, brass, and percussion sections. This quarter, the orchestra had a medium size string section with standard woodwind instruments and standard brass section instruments.2 For the woodwinds, percussion, and brass, the standard amount of musicians specified for each piece were used accordingly. Throughout each season, the orchestra is typically comprised of university students with a small presence of community players throughout the orchestra.3 While there is a strong presence of music majors, the majority of the participating university students were non-music majors across various majors. A small group of five Ph.D. music students also participated in the 2018 Spring orchestra concerts, where two (including myself) played 1st violin, one played viola, one played 1st flute, and one played bass trombone. Instrument proficiency levels and performance experience spanned a wide range throughout the orchestra; many of the students who were not music majors may have had previous orchestral performance experience in high school ensembles, while others had little to no exposure in performing with a symphony orchestra.4 While the majority of instrumental proficiency among musicians 2 A standard full-scale string section would have 16-18 1st violins, 16 2nd violins, 12 violas, 12 cellos, 8 double basses. The UCDSO had 11 1st violins, 10 2nd violins, 8 Violas, 8 Cellos, and 4 Double Basses. 3 Community players were older adults outside of college or high school students. 4 This last general statement was discovered by taking a short survey of a small sample size of about 10-12 members who were non-music majors. General questions such as, “Have you ever played with an orchestra before coming to UC Davis?” and “How many years have you played with an orchestra?” were asked. 3 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan throughout the orchestra was quite high, there were also a number members, particularly in the strings, who performed at a novice level but were still welcomed to participate.5 UCDSO performances are held in Jackson Hall of the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, a venue that seats 1,801 people in the audience. It is built with adjustable panels in the design to house any world-class orchestra or ensemble of acoustic instruments to their preferred acoustic specifications. The selected repertoire that was performed in this hall that will be examined with the experience of the subjects were Jean Sibelius’ Symphony no. 6 (1923), György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto (1993), and Nikolai RimskyKorsakov’s Scheherazade (1888). All of the subjects that were interviewed described elements of groove from each composition that related to the performance aspect of the music. Musical examples and time stamps of videos from YouTube will be provided in this paper to supplement analysis and descriptions of events in the live performance. Three subjects were used to conduct my research on groove: Veronika Blanco, Christian Baldini, and myself. Veronika Blanco was a nineteen-year-old music major who was one of the main players in the percussion section of the orchestra, where she was usually assigned the most prominent percussion parts in each piece. She has had previous experience in percussion performance in her high school orchestra, band, and drumline. Her instrumental roles varied throughout each repertoire piece; she performed timpani in Sibelius’ Symphony no. 6, multiple instruments such as glockenspiel and marimba in Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, and timpani in Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Christian Baldini is a young conductor who is on faculty in the UC Davis music department, and is the current director of the UCDSO. He holds multiple degrees in music: a 5 Many of these “novice” members were located in the 2 nd violins, viola, and cello. The level of proficiency of the participants were realized through observations over time in weekly rehearsals and final performances. 4 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan master’s in conducting from the Pennsylvania State University, and a Ph.D. in Composition from the State University of New York at Buffalo. As a conductor and composer, he is well-decorated in both facets of his musical career with a long list of accolades. All of these awards and honors speak to his high level as a musician and scholar trained in the Western classical tradition. The last subject of examination I am including in this paper is myself. My experience in violin performance started around fourth grade, after taking lessons for about a year. I started by performing in church and youth orchestras until middle school when I was no longer interested in playing. After my freshman year in high school, I decided to start performing again with my high school orchestra and stopped after I graduated. When I was twenty-one, I decided to focus my collegiate studies on music composition, where all music students were required to participate in a large performance ensemble. I performed as a member of the Sacramento State Symphony Orchestra for the three years until I graduated in Spring 2015, and had not performed consistently with an ensemble until I joined the UCDSO in the Spring Quarter of 2018. What does Groove Mean and How Does It Operate? In this paper, I am interested in exploring some of the social and phenomenological aspects of what we studied in our groove seminar this quarter. Some of the questions I asked myself and the subjects were: What does groove mean to an orchestral musician? How do we enter these groove states? What are the characteristics of entering and operating in these states? How does our sense of groove with each piece evolve over time? How is groove transmitted and communicated through the orchestra? How do orchestra members use their body to communicate information to each other? The responses to these questions by each of the subjects brought up a variety of interesting and diverse answers that were taken from their own personal experiences and ideas of what groove meant to them in an orchestral performance setting. 5 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan One of the more challenging aspects of this specific study was to define what groove meant in orchestral performance practice. In Mark Abel’s book, he stated that musicians generally respond to groove as “the rhythmic feel of a piece of music, where instruments of any rhythmic section would interlock and interact with each other to create a unified rhythmic effect.”6 This, of course, was in relation to dance-based music across various genres and cultures and used in his argument for groove as, “a musical phenomenon that is unique to twentiethcentury popular music.”7 Abel offers an interesting comparison of how groove is defined among scholars in “twentieth-century groove music and nineteenth-century orchestral and chamber music repertoire,” stating figures such as Monson and Iyer viewing groove-based music as “playing and keeping time” and “featuring a steady and isochronous pulse.”8 Iyer argued that “European Classical music would not fall into the realm of groove-based music because of the reliance on tempo variation for expressive purposes,” referring to tempo fluctuations such as rallentando, ritardando, accelerando, fermatas, and rubato as too flexible in the “less forgiving realm of tempo variation” in music such as jazz or western popular songs.9 Clearly, Iyer and Abel were arguing that “tightness” or “temporal accuracy” was an underlying factor of groove in music that was not inherent in European classical music. These ideals of what groove is in music leads us to an interesting point in my studies of how I am identifying the elements of groove in orchestral music. Definitely, there is a validity to Abel and Iyer’s arguments; many of the features they found essential to groove in music are features of groove that we have been studying throughout the quarter. But is it possible that 6 Abel, Mark, Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, (Chicago, Haymarket, 2015), 18. Ibid., 24. 8 Ibid., 26. 9 Ibid., 26. 7 6 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan classical music moves to different elements of groove outside of what is described here? The term groove itself is a broad term that can refer to a variety of elements of aesthetics in performance practice or phenomenological events in a piece of music. Take the commonly used phrase “being-in-the-groove.” Even though positive musical experiences are often attributed to this phrase, it often extends to references outside of music. It is commonly used in sports, such as referring to a tennis who found his rhythm and is consistently hitting well - he is considered to be in-the-groove. Outside of sports, we might think of a financial consultant who is in a steady flow of generating business and sales as being-in-the-groove. In music, being-in-the-groove outside of the music that Abel and Iyer describe could mean entering in a steady flow of concentration where one reaches a state of synchrony with the ensemble players around them. Recontextualizing groove in this manner then becomes more broad and applicable to music outside of popular or cultural dance music, opening an opportunity for us to investigate what elements of classical music groove, and how orchestral performers reach higher states of groove similarly to how performers might reach these states in music genres more commonly associated with groove. In the next paragraphs, I will discuss each subject’s response to how groove was operating in their experience as well as offer musical examples to supplement these experiences that they described in our interviews. Veronika Blanco Veronika’s interview offered a number of interesting responses to what groove meant to her as a percussionist in the UCDSO. Groove for her involved “having a feeling to move” as well as “feeling the music in your body.” The pieces that she felt “grooved” the most for her was Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, where she primarily played marimba and glockenspiel. Marimba 7 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan played a crucial role in a number of the movements, especially in the first movement where the soloist and the marimba are striking accented notes in irregular rhythms in unison. Ex. 1 – Ligeti Violin Concerto mvmt. I mm. 13-18 The example above is taken from the performance score of the concerto. Throughout this section, the soloist is playing consistent sixteenth notes that oscillate across multiple strings rapidly and accents certain notes that pop out of the ostinato texture. These accented notes in the violin are to be performed in unison with single-struck notes in the marimba. During the weeks leading up to the concert, Veronika had learned the passage on her own because the orchestra would only have three one-hour rehearsals with the soloist, all held on the week of the concert. She noted with this piece, it took her an exceptionally long time to “get used to the groove.” For her, one aspect of being able to get into the groove meant achieving a natural flow where she was able to instinctually strike the single accented notes in the correct place in time. In the weeks leading up to the final rehearsals with the soloist, she had attempted to practice this passage with a metronome, but still felt it was difficult to feel the accents. Since counting these 8 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan rhythms did not feel natural to her and in some ways counter-intuitive, her percussion teacher recommended that she listened to a number of recordings of the violin concerto. This method allowed her to entrain the rhythms in her mind and body, allowing her to operate between what Thomas Turino describes as “states of Firstness and Secondness,” being able to perform on a level where instinct begins to take place and performing feels more in-the-moment.10 Before Veronika was reach a state of Secondness, all the practice and preparation was done in a state of “Thirdness,” which Turino describes as “semiosis involving the mind to make something of the sign-object relationship.”11 This state of Thirdness, where Veronika went through the process of learning her percussion part in the Ligeti was a process of turning “signs” and “objects” into “indices;” forming indices in this music helped her develop automatic relationships between what was written and how she needed to perform it. Because of how complex the music was written and notated, it was crucial for her to develop indexical relationships within the music to be able to successfully function in states of Secondness and Firstness during the performance. When the soloist, Miranda Cuckson, had come to rehearse the concerto with the orchestra, Veronika stated that at first it did not feel natural to play her unison part with Miranda. She describes the first rehearsals as “learning Miranda’s tendencies within her solo line.” As seen in the video recording, Miranda’s interpretation of the music in this passage was executed in a fairly straightforward manner with evidence of slight rubato within the phrases and accented melodic notes.12 During the first two rehearsals, Veronika describes the experience of rehearsing with Miranda as intensely attempting to follow her, having little confidence of where to place her 10 Turino, Thomas, “Peircean Thought as Core Theory for a Phenomenological Ethnomusicology,” (Ethnomusicology), 206-207. 11 Ibid., 191. 12 The video recording of this passage can be accessed on: https://youtu.be/Ys1QHB7y3Ts?t=23m15s 9 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan notes. After those two rehearsals, she noticed that she had become more comfortable with Miranda and learned how to read cues from her body movements (since Miranda was facing away towards the audience). Veronika claims from this moment on through the performance, she it felt it was significantly easier to play along with her and had reached a state of being “in-thegroove” with Miranda. Being in-the-groove for Veronika in this circumstance meant keeping a strict sense of rhythm and playing in time with the orchestra and the soloist. This particular section of the piece called for a certain “tightness” and contains some of the elements that Abel argues are inherent in music that grooves; from the video performance and the score, you can see and hear that there is a strict attitude to the pulse of metronomic time over highly syncopated musical lines.13 Ligeti’s Violin Concerto would most likely not be a piece that Abel characterizes as groovy because it is lacks the other elements such as back beats, deep metricality, and cyclical repetition over multileveled meters over long durations. When examining and listening to this specific instance of Veronika’s experience with performing her part Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, we might recognize that some element of groove is embedded into the music even though that groove process is obfuscated because the composer has engineered a sense of wild unpredictability in the successive pattern of notes. Christian Baldini Christian Baldini has been the Music Director and conductor of the UCDSO since 2009. As a conductor, Christian described his job as intellectual as well as emotional. He saw one of his responsibilities as being “the safety net of the orchestra, having to live through every moment to help monitor the performers.” The role of a conductor to him was not a one-way street, and 13 Abel, Groove, 42. 10 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan recognized that communication across the orchestra was vital to having success in performance. He said, “In an ideal situation, you wouldn’t have to move a finger and they could play themselves.” In my experience with Christian as a conductor, I learned he was not shy to using unorthodox rehearsal techniques in attempts to expand the orchestra’s perception of the music. During one rehearsal, Christian conducted an exercise with the orchestra called “mixing,” a technique that is more commonly practiced with choirs when a conductor is looking to find better sense of balance or blend across the voices. This exercise demanded that every player sat by a different instrument in a different section, where we would all switch to a different spot in the orchestra several times throughout the rehearsal. Christian saw the point of this exercise as giving the individual a greater sense of autonomy over their part in the music; for string players this is particularly important because it is easy to become codependent on players around you to lead you through the music. Mixing up players throughout the orchestra helped give all the members a broader perspective on the parts that they do not normally get to hear in close proximity. Christian strongly believed to be able to groove to something, you have to hear it and feel it; when Christian started shaking things up, it forced the players to listen to each other across all sections to be able to perform as a unit under these untypical situations. In our interview, he had number of responses of what groove meant to him in the context of classical music. The initial statement that is given below shows that Christian relates to groove in a similar way to what we have been discussing throughout the quarter: Groove is a verb, but also a noun. It is something you live, but also experience. There is a double intent embedded in the word; as a performer you have to feel it, and to find it you have to be in the moment. 11 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan Groove terminology was often important to Christian’s rehearsal vocabulary when describing how to execute specific passages of music. When applicable, he would often relate passages to Flamenco or Tango to try to inspire the orchestra to move more or get “into the groove” of a certain section in a piece. Once he said: “you have to feel like you want to dance here, you have to be moving inside and through your sound and have to convince us that you are feeling it!” The analogy of feeling like we should be Flamenco dancing was often used when we were rehearsing the third movement of Sibelius’ Symphony no. 6. Ex. 2 – Sibelius Symphony no. 6 Mvmt. III, rehearsal D In this movement, the eighth note – sixteenth note rest – eighth note rhythm was a rhythmic motive used throughout each section.14 Christian’s choice in using dance terminology was 14 The video recording of this movement can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/Ys1QHB7y3Ts?t=1h29m37s 12 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan probably an attempt to get us to feel “lighter on our feet,” or in more technical terms – an attempt to get us away from the heavy Beethovenian orchestral sound. Finding or connecting relationships between orchestral music and groove was an important aesthetical practice to Christian’s as a conductor. Being able to “let go” as a conductor was a necessary part of being able to get into the groove of the music. To “let go” meant to be able to reach a place where there is a trust gained between the players and conductor. In our rehearsals, Christian was known to take risks, sometimes taking music at paces almost too fast for the orchestra to handle. This was particularly true when we were rehearsing the third movement of the symphony; when I asked him about this, he replied: “Taking risks makes for more exciting moments. Sometimes taking the safer route is not always the best, but if I have to simplify, but not until until I have exhausted all options.” This might be somewhat related to what Abel described about Alfred Shultz’s flux of inner time and “phrasing,” where Abel states that the crucial point between the musical work and content involves a synchronization of temporal fluxes in the listener and the composer’s music.15 Christian’s executive decision to take the music faster can be seen as a result of his lived experience as a musician, choosing to “phrase” this movement as a period of tension in the overall musical flux.16 The tension may come across to the audience in how fast the music is moving as well as through observing that the orchestra is riding on the edge of their capabilities. One example of this on the micro-level is where Christian explicitly advocated for a synchronization of temporal fluxes in one of the concertmaster’s solos in Scheherazade. During one rehearsal, the concertmaster was performing her passage in a fairly straightforward manner 15 16 Abel, 127. Ibid., 129. 13 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan when Christian stated to her that he saw the music as more “dance-like” and whimsical. Christian told the concertmaster this passage should not be played strictly in time, advocating for creating a temporal flux within the given bar lines.17 In the recording of the performance, you can hear the concertmaster taking liberties of pushing and stretching the tempo, as well as executing the micro-organization of notes in an uneven manner. While this change was quite subtle, it gave the music a higher quality of groove that may be connected to ideas related to micro-timing. Ex. 3 – Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheheraze, mvmt. I, rehearsal C To Christian, groove seemed to mean a number of things that relates to what we have been covering in the groove seminar this quarter. In my interviews him, it is clear that groove involves having the impetus to move and in some cases, having the feeling to dance. The orchestra performing in synchrony was also an important qualifier of groove, and this was achieved through a line of trust between the conductor and the performers. Phrases used by Christian such as “being in-the-moment” might allude to the optimal desire of operating in a state of Secondness, where his mind does not have to reflect on the sign-object relationship experienced in a state of Thirdness. This state of Thirdness is probably experienced often in rehearsal, when Christian often has to observe and listen to what is not operating correctly across the ensemble. I believe that one of the end goals of Christian as a conductor and a teacher is to 17 The video recording of this passage can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/eifwWqy9Qhc?t=56m2s 14 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan prepare the ensemble to operate outside of a state of Thirdness, where the music begins to flow more naturally in these ordered states of consciousness. My Experience as a member of the UCDSO As a performer with the UCDSO, I was assigned to play with the first violin section of the orchestra. My assignment was not a designated leadership role; in a first violin section of an orchestra, the leadership falls directly under the concertmaster, sometimes extending out to the second and third chair in the event that the concertmaster is unable to attend a rehearsal or concert or is designated a specific assignment on a piece. An instance of the redesignation of leadership was seen in Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, where the concertmaster was asked by the conductor to play a separate solo violin part which required a specific scordatura tuning that was unlike the other violins. Outside of this separate violin part, the score called for four other violins with standard tuning, all with separate parts labeled “Violin I, II, III, and IV.” The second and third chair were assigned Violin I and II, with the sitting second chair violinist of the section assumed the concertmaster position. My assignment was to perform the Violin III part, which did not contain any prominent solos compared to the Violin I part. One of the sections in the Violin Concerto that elicited the highest amount of groove in this piece was found in a tutti of the first movement. As seen in Ex. 3 below, Ligeti had divided the 4/2 bar into an irregular pattern of (3+2+2+2) + (3+2+2). This grouping is believed to be influenced by African rhythms that Ligeti had become fascinated with from the middle to late periods of his compositional output. It is not exactly clear where these rhythms were derived from but the pattern is detailed in specificity by the grouping and dotted bar lines. 15 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan While this section is short lived and never comes backs into its fully realized form, it contains a repetition of the pattern that should be executed with a “tightness” that eludes to what we experience in groove-based music.18 Ex. 3 – Ligeti’s Violin Concerto mvmt. I mm. 34 – 36 I had also used other strategies such as slow practicing while counting to be able to internalize the beat and over time would increase the speed to be able to play up to tempo. Once I had taken the music from a state of Thirdness to Secondness on a personal level, the next task was attempting to find where my part fit in with the rest of the ensemble. For most of the Rehearsals, I was operating in a state of Thirdness; I was often confused about where my part fit in, never quite feeling in-the-groove with the rest of the orchestra. In the rehearsals leading up to the concert, the orchestra never felt like it had confidently entered a confident sense of groove 18 The video recording of this section can be accessed on: https://youtu.be/Ys1QHB7y3Ts?t=24m18s 16 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan with each other. From my perspective, it often felt that everyone (including myself) had a lack of understanding of how the parts were operating with each other. It was not until Miranda came the week of the performance where everyone started to have a stronger sense of where their part fit into the music. I could feel Veronika had a better sense where her percussion part fit in with soloist because she had finally had someone to play the part with. I also noticed that Christian was finally able to “let go” to a higher degree with his conducting because he was able to rely on Miranda to relay information to the orchestra through her solo melodic lines or visual cues. I could tell Miranda’s presence changed the dynamic of the orchestra’s overall performance level for the better because I was able to find higher groove states by obtaining a clearer sense of how my own part was operating within the ensemble. In my own personal experience in playing with the orchestra with quarter, groove was something that had to be developed over time. There was very little groove, if any, in the first few rehearsals of starting a new piece. Everyone was usually sight reading and had limited knowledge about how their part functioned within the ensemble. For me, this is generally a negative experience, because all of my senses that need to be stimulated in order to ascend into a higher groove state are not aroused. For me, being-in-the-groove requires that everyone around me understands their part, and without that type of confidence felt within the ensemble it becomes very difficult to enjoy the music because experiencing groove is usually accompanied with feelings of pleasure and gratification. For any orchestra to obtain this level, they need to develop a sense of continuous exchange of information across the ensemble; a study by Alessandro D’ausilo et. al found that a “musician has to wisely balance several external sources of information and mix them up inorder to reach the required performance.”19 These sources of 19 D’Ausilio, Alessandro, et. al, “Leadership in Orchestra,” (Lecture Notes) 275 17 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan information may have to do with Turino’s explanations of icons, signs, and symbols taken from Peircean theory and applied to phenomenological music studies. Performers are constantly applying indexical information that is obtained and stored in our memory during individual practice and group rehearsals. Over time, a strong “iconicity” of each piece is developed so it can allow us as performers to make sense of how the music operates and to be able to utilize the stored indexical information necessary to operate in a state of Secondness and Firstness.20 Conclusion Discovering what groove means in a symphony orchestra was an interesting endeavor because musicians that are classically trained do not necessarily feel music the same way that a performer of groove-based music experiences it. Both Veronika and Christian related groove to movement or dance and felt that the idea of groove was important to have the ability to perform well. It was also interesting to find that there were many similarities in their responses that are connected to some of the scholarship we have been analyzing throughout this course. In this course, we learned Groove could refer to a number of things: how music is structured, the subtle and nuanced elements, the stimulus to move, a state of consciousness, or an overall feeling. It is difficult to analyze groove within classical music when it is described in the context of what Abel as well as many other scholars have defined. Most classical music does not contain highly repetitive or cyclical forms, and contains too much flux in tempo to require the “tightness” that is characteristic of music that grooves. When we take away these elements as precursors for groove, it is easier to observe similarities and ideas related to groove across genres. The performers I interviewed found a strong relevance to groove-based music in their own interpretations of classical music that helped them reach a higher state of ordered consciousness 20 Turino, Peircean Theory, 192. 18 Prof. Diaz MUS 223 Spring 2018 Josiah Tayag Catalan in their performance. It was also helpful that groove is something that is quite open-ended and broad, allowing it to be applicable in tracing elements of groove through my experience of performing with the UCDSO. Bibliography Abel, Mark. Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015. D’Ausilio, Alessandro, Leonardo Badino, Yi Li, Sera Tokay, Laila Craighero, Rosario Canto, Yiannis Aloimonos, and Luciano Fadiga. "Communication in Orchestra Playing as Measured with Granger Causality." Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment, 2012, 273-75. Janata, Petr, Stefan T. Tomic, and Jason M. Haberman. "Sensorimotor Coupling in Music and the Psychology of the Groove." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141, no. 1 (2012): 54-75. Turino, Thomas. "Peircean Thought As Core TheoryFor A Phenomenological Ethnomusicology." Ethnomusicology 58, no. 2 (2014): 185-221 19