Stratificazione metrica e modularità costruttiva in "Straight, No Chaser" di Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk’s composition “Straight, No Chaser” is here used from the musical and aesthetical standpoint to reflect on the special state of jazz composition in general and to carry out a textual analysis in particular. Besides pointing out differences with the musical works belonging to the western world musical tradition according to the so called “audiotactile principle”, the author draws an original distinction within the concepts of musical genres that do not form part of the European cultured tradition, and defines as “audiotactile” those twentieth-century musical genres (especially jazz) that formally show the influence of the technological encoding resulting from the medium of sound recording. This process re-establishes aesthetic connotations pertaining to the concepts of work, creative originality and formal evolution which were unknown to the forms of traditional oral cultures. At first, the analytic study of Monk’s composition, based on an actual performance, shows the dissonant metric stratifications in the text that, at second level, paradigmatically identify constructive units. Finally, when the units are considered in a topological way, it is possible to discover one more semantic level concerning numerical relationships recurring in the deep infrastructure of Monk’s short composition, thus letting its powerful inner symmetry emerge. The essay also deals with the intersemiotic relationship between graphic and sound systems. Over the course of the analysis, the perceptive transformation of sound, resulting from its gradual change of conceptual representation deriving from the analysis, coincides with a homologous new formulation of the notational image of the text. Therefore, a few transcriptions of the composition also aimed at carrying out an analytic study are offered. The composition is re-transcribed in four different stages with the aim to elude the space-perceptive conventions culturally inherent in the written notation, successively presenting changes homologous to the development of the analytic study.