The Theory of Participatory Discrepancies: A Progress Report

s background and introduction to this trio of papers let me summarize briefly the main arguments and affirmations I put forward in Motion and Feeling through (1966) and Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of (1987b), both now available in juxtaposition with Steve Feld's articles in Music Grooves (1994). Thirty years ago in a seminar at the University of Chicago with Leonard Meyer I became angry and increasingly frustrated as I realized that Professor Meyer's arguments in favor of syntax, emotion and meaning in music, the deferred gratifications of melodic/harmonic tensions, though certainly an excellent summation of the Western music esthetic, could not account for the value and greatness I felt in the John Coltrane Quartet, in jazz generally and in all the groovy, sensual musics of the world. So I set out to overturn Meyer's paradigm completely, put syntax at the bottom and vital drive or on top. I think I was deconstructing the Western civilization esthetic and music-as-text way ahead of the French deconstructionist school and the core of the argument is certainly pre-post-structuralist as well: music is not primarily about structure at all. Music is about process, not product; it's not seriousness and practice in deferring gratification but play and pleasure (French 1985) that we humans need from it; groove or vital drive is not some essence of all music that we can simply take for granted, but must be figured out each time between players; music is not so much about abstract emotions and meanings, reason, cause and effect, logic, but rather about motions, dance, global and contradictory feelings; it's not about composers bringing forms from on high for mere mortals to realize or approximate, it's about getting down and into the groove, everyone creating socially from the bottom up.