David Chesky probably needs little introduction to Copper readers. In 1984 he and his brother Norman started Chesky Records, a pioneering audiophile reissue label, and David later founded HDtracks and The Audiophile Society. He is a renowned musician and composer with countless albums to his credit.
He has some unique thoughts about the state of classical music today:
I live in two musical worlds. One is the world of my jazz and Latin trios, where rhythm is the foundation of everything, where musicians breathe together through a shared pulse, and where the music is as much a physical experience as an intellectual one. The other is the world of my orchestral works and operas, where I find myself operating within an entirely different musical culture, one governed by the traditions, aesthetics, and expectations of Western classical music.
As a composer who moves between these two worlds, I find the contrast both fascinating and perplexing. In my jazz and Latin ensembles, groove is not an ornament added to the music; it is the very foundation upon which the music is constructed. Yet in the orchestral world, rhythm frequently serves a different purpose. Percussion is often employed not as the foundation of a rhythmic organism but as an instrument of punctuation, color, dramatic emphasis, and architectural reinforcement. In one world, rhythm is the architecture. In the other, it is often decoration.
This distinction raises a fundamental question about the evolution of Western classical music: How did the most sophisticated acoustic instrument ever assembled become so disconnected from one of music's most elemental human experiences—the groove?
Consider Earth, Wind & Fire or the Oscar Peterson Trio. These musicians do not merely play in time. They inhabit time. Their music possesses a gravitational center, an underlying rhythmic continuum that the body recognizes before the intellect has an opportunity to analyze it. The listener does not need to understand harmonic progressions, rhythmic subdivisions, or compositional structures to participate. The body responds instinctively. A foot begins tapping. The head moves. The listener becomes physically involved in the music.
This is not a superficial response. It is a profound form of musical cognition, one that connects perception, anticipation, movement, and emotion. And it is an experience that seems increasingly foreign to much of contemporary orchestral composition.
What Is Groove?
Groove is often misunderstood as simply a steady beat or a repetitive rhythmic pattern. But a metronome has a steady beat, and nobody has ever accused a metronome of being funky. Groove is something considerably more sophisticated. It emerges from the dynamic relationships among pulse, subdivision, articulation, anticipation, delay, and the interaction of multiple rhythmic voices. It exists in the tension between mathematical time and perceived time, between the precision of the underlying pulse and the expressive freedom with which musicians inhabit it.
A bass player may place a note fractionally behind the beat. A drummer may articulate the backbeat with a particular weight. A pianist may anticipate a harmonic change while maintaining the larger rhythmic structure. None of these gestures exists in isolation. Their meaning emerges from their relationship to the collective pulse. Groove is therefore not simply a property of individual notes. It is an emergent property of musical interaction, a shared conception of time.
This is why two ensembles can perform precisely the same notes at precisely the same tempo and produce radically different rhythmic experiences. One performance may be technically flawless yet feel inert. The other may possess an almost irresistible physical momentum. The distinction cannot be adequately explained by notation alone. Most importantly, groove is a physical phenomenon. The body participates in the musical experience.
The Orchestra and the Architecture of Time
The symphony orchestra is arguably the most sophisticated acoustic instrument ever devised. It possesses an almost limitless vocabulary of timbre, harmony, texture, dynamics, and expressive nuance. An orchestra can move from the intimacy of a solo violin to the overwhelming force of a hundred musicians. It can sustain harmonic structures of extraordinary complexity, create intricate contrapuntal relationships, and explore an immense range of sonic colors. Yet for all this sophistication, its rhythmic culture often seems curiously disconnected from the physical experience of pulse.
This is not to suggest that classical music lacks rhythm. Quite the opposite. The Western classical tradition has produced some of the most rhythmically complex music ever written. Beethoven understood the enormous dramatic power of rhythmic insistence. Stravinsky transformed rhythmic organization into a revolutionary compositional language. Bartók explored asymmetrical meters, folk rhythms, and extraordinary patterns of accentuation. But rhythmic complexity and groove are not synonymous. One can construct a rhythmically intricate composition without ever establishing a sustained physical relationship between the listener and the pulse.
Indeed, the more elaborate the rhythmic architecture becomes, the more difficult it may be for the listener to internalize a stable rhythmic center. Complexity can stimulate the intellect without necessarily engaging the body. The distinction is crucial. Groove is not the absence of complexity. Some of the most sophisticated rhythmic interactions in jazz, funk, Afro-Cuban music, and other traditions occur within an exceptionally stable underlying pulse. The complexity exists in relation to that pulse rather than replacing it.
Perhaps this is one of the essential differences between these musical cultures: in groove-based music, rhythmic sophistication frequently develops around a shared center of gravity. In much contemporary orchestral music, the center itself is continually displaced, fragmented, or deliberately dissolved. Both approaches can produce remarkable art, but they create fundamentally different relationships with the listener.
Part of a symphony orchestra percussion section. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Sturm.
The Limits of Notation
Part of this divide may be institutional. Classical musicians undergo years of rigorous training devoted to interpreting notation with extraordinary accuracy. They learn to negotiate complex meters, difficult subdivisions, shifting tempos, and intricate ensemble relationships. Precision is an essential professional virtue. But precision alone does not create groove. A musician can reproduce every written rhythm correctly and still fail to generate the collective rhythmic sensation that characterizes a great jazz trio or funk ensemble.
Groove requires something beyond technical accuracy: a shared internal conception of time. It must be internalized, collectively negotiated, and physically felt. In many groove-based traditions, musicians develop this sensibility through immersion, listening, repetition, improvisation, and continuous interaction with other players. Time becomes not merely something to measure but something to inhabit.
The difference is analogous to language. A person can pronounce every word of a foreign language correctly and still fail to capture its natural cadence, inflection, and expressive rhythm. The grammar may be perfect, but the language does not breathe. Similarly, an orchestral performance may be rhythmically impeccable while lacking the underlying physical momentum that makes music groove.
This raises an uncomfortable question: Has classical music developed an educational culture that prioritizes the accurate reproduction of rhythmic information over the embodied experience of rhythmic time?
The Cultural Divide
We live in 2026, surrounded by musical traditions in which groove plays a central role. Hip-hop, funk, electronic dance music, Latin music, R&B, contemporary pop, and countless other genres organize much of their musical language around pulse and rhythmic interaction. These traditions differ enormously in harmony, instrumentation, production, and cultural history. Yet they share an important characteristic: rhythm is frequently experienced as a physical and social force. The body is invited into the music.
Now consider the aesthetic environment of much contemporary orchestral composition. One frequently encounters atmospheric textures, spectral colors, extended instrumental techniques, suspended time, evolving sound masses, and elaborate sonic landscapes. Much of this music is intellectually fascinating, technically demanding, and exquisitely crafted. Composers have expanded the sonic possibilities of the orchestra in extraordinary ways. But where is the pulse? Where is the rhythmic propulsion? Where is the invitation for the body to participate?
It is almost as though we step off the street, leave behind the rhythmic language of contemporary civilization, and enter a specialized environment governed by an entirely different set of aesthetic assumptions. Inside the concert hall, musical sophistication is often associated with harmonic complexity, structural innovation, timbral exploration, and the manipulation of abstract musical time. Outside the concert hall, millions of listeners experience musical sophistication through the subtle relationships among rhythm, movement, repetition, and collective energy.
Neither world possesses a monopoly on artistic depth. But the separation between them has become remarkably pronounced.
Why Young Audiences May Be Listening Elsewhere
Perhaps this divide helps explain one aspect of classical music's difficulty in attracting younger audiences. The problem is frequently discussed in terms of education, accessibility, marketing, ticket prices, and the perceived elitism of classical institutions. All these factors deserve consideration. But perhaps there is also a more fundamental musical issue.
Young listeners have grown up in a culture where rhythm is central to their experience of music. The relationship between sound and physical movement is not an optional embellishment; it is part of the musical language they understand instinctively. When these listeners encounter contemporary orchestral music that largely abandons a recognizable pulse, they are being asked to enter a fundamentally different perceptual world.
This does not mean they are incapable of appreciating complexity, abstraction, or unfamiliar musical structures. Nor does it mean that orchestral music must imitate popular music to remain relevant. But it does suggest that the classical establishment may underestimate the importance of rhythmic embodiment in contemporary musical experience. We often assume that younger audiences need to be educated to appreciate the orchestra. Perhaps the orchestra might also learn something from the musical cultures that younger audiences already understand.
Has Classical Music Confused Complexity with Vitality?
I am not suggesting that all music must groove. That would be as absurd as insisting that all paintings must be representational, all poetry must rhyme, or all architecture must follow the same aesthetic principles. Music must remain free to explore silence, abstraction, ambiguity, stillness, and every imaginable dimension of human experience. But I do wonder why groove has become so conspicuously absent from so much contemporary orchestral thinking.
Why is rhythmic repetition sometimes treated as aesthetically simplistic, while the dissolution of pulse is associated with compositional sophistication? Why do we celebrate increasingly elaborate rhythmic structures while paying comparatively little attention to the subtleties of collective rhythmic feel? Why has the exploration of timbre become such a dominant concern in contemporary orchestral composition, while the physical organization of musical time has often been relegated to a secondary role?
Have we confused rhythmic sophistication with rhythmic vitality? Have we elevated the complexity of musical time while abandoning the experience of it?
These are not arguments against modernism, experimentation, or intellectual ambition. They are questions about the boundaries of our musical imagination. The orchestra has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to absorb new harmonic languages, instrumental techniques, technologies, and aesthetic philosophies. Why should it be any less capable of embracing the rhythmic intelligence found in jazz, funk, hip-hop, and other groove-based traditions?
The challenge is not simply to place a drum kit behind an orchestra or add a repetitive bass line to an otherwise conventional composition. That would confuse the surface characteristics of groove with its deeper structural principles. The real challenge is to reconsider how an orchestra organizes and experiences time.
It requires thinking of rhythm not merely as a sequence of notated durations but as a living, collective phenomenon. It means recognizing that the placement of a note can be as expressive as its pitch, that the relationship between two rhythmic voices can be as sophisticated as the relationship between two harmonies, and that physical momentum can possess an artistic depth equal to harmonic or timbral complexity.
Reimagining the Orchestra
The symphony orchestra does not need to abandon its traditions to engage with the rhythmic language of the contemporary world. It needs to expand them. Imagine an orchestral culture in which the rhythmic sophistication of the Oscar Peterson Trio, the collective precision of Earth, Wind & Fire, and the structural imagination of Stravinsky are not regarded as belonging to separate musical universes.
Imagine an orchestra that can move seamlessly between suspended atmospheric textures and a deeply internalized rhythmic pulse, without treating one as intellectually superior to the other. Imagine a generation of composers for whom groove is not a stylistic reference borrowed from popular music but a fundamental compositional resource, as rich in expressive possibilities as harmony, counterpoint, or orchestration.
Such an approach would not diminish the orchestra's sophistication. It might reveal dimensions of that sophistication that remain largely unexplored. For centuries, composers have investigated what the orchestra can sound like. Perhaps it is time to reconsider what the orchestra can feel like.
Because music is not simply an intellectual arrangement of sounds unfolding through measured time. It is also a human activity rooted in movement, anticipation, memory, and the physical experience of being alive. The orchestra has mastered the art of coloring time, stretching time, suspending time, and fragmenting time. But perhaps, somewhere along the way, it has become less interested in making time move.
And that brings us back to the central question: What if one of the most radical things a contemporary composer could do with a symphony orchestra is simply make it groove?
Header image courtesy of Patricia Dinely/David Chesky.
0 comments