Thelonious Monk Architect

Thelonious Monk Architect

Fleeting White Space Editions, New York, 1986

Historically, the establishment of an effective musical notation was originally the difficult exercise to find significant relationships between sound and the visual, to say, finding graphic equivalents to sounds. According to convened rules, any coding system, in theory, would do. Yet the relationship between music and graphic representation was based on analogies of feelings. The main analogy has been to mark at different heights the duration of the sound and those of their intervals on a score representing the linear flow of time. If notes, hierarchized from bass to treble on a vertical scale, show certain articulations and constructions, the intermediate heights of sharps and flats or microtones are not visible, and their horizontal arrangement on the score dissolves their structure. Leaving the logic of linear and horizontal reading, the project Thelonious Monk does not intent to propose another kind of notation, but to group the graphic equivalents of the notes and intervals within a pictorial field. The intention here is to translate music visually, to study in structural terms its movements and its stases.