Phenomenological and Musical Analysis of The Reinhardt-South-Grappelli Recordings of J.S.Bach's Double Violin Concerto (BWV 1043)

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Phenomenological and Musical Analysis of the Reinhardt-South-Grappelli

Recordings of J.S.Bach's Double Violin Concerto (BWV 1043)
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Vincenzo Caporaletti, Università di Macerata
PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND MUSICAL ANALYSIS
1.1. Socio-Anthropological/Aesthetic Aspects
The two versions of J.S. Bach’s 1th Movement from the Concerto in D Minor for Two Vio-
lins and Orchestra BWV 1043, recorded in Paris on 23 and 25 November 1937 by the jazz trio
featuring Django Reinhardt (guitar), Eddie South and Stéphane Grappelli (violins), above and
beyond their indisputable aesthetic worth, represent an extraordinary case of cultural hybri-
dization.1 Due to their intrinsic qualities as multi-layered phenomena, from both an artistic
and a cultural perspective, for the purposes of the present text these pieces offer an excellent
opportunity to explore a series of interpretative models whose implications are at once aesthetic,
anthropological, sociological and musicological.
As a preliminary methodological note, I must clarify immediately that the processes of hybri-
dization at work in these pieces, along with the formal aspects generated by this cultural in-
terrelation, will be interpreted on the basis of my Theory of Audiotactile Formativity (TAF).2
This perspective brings together various tendencies in cultural criticism, all of which are now
well consolidated and go beyond any anthropological categorisation based on merely ethnic or
geographical criteria (i.e., the ‘hard’ parameters underlying ‘classical’ ethnomusicological epi-
stemology, that in this case would segment the systemic field with an opposition, for example,
between the African-American South and the two Francophones Europeans), turning instead
to the cognitive and identitarian factors in play (‘soft’ parameters). It goes without saying that
these latter dynamics have identified crucial issues in contemporary ethnomusicology.3
1 The exact names given to the two recordings are: Interprétation Swing du Premier Mouvement du Concerto en
Ré Mineur de J.-S. Bach (hereafter Interprétation), record 78 rpm Swing 18 A, m. OLA 1896-1 and Improvisa-
tion sur le Premier Mouvement du Concerto en Ré Mineur de J.-S. Bach (hereafter Improvisation), record 78 rpm
Swing 18 B, m. OLA 1993-1.
2 See, among other texts, Vincenzo Caporaletti, I processi improvvisativi nella musica. Un approccio globale (Lucca:
LIM, 2005); Esperienze di analisi del jazz (Lucca: LIM, 2007); Jelly Roll Morton, the ‘Old Quadrille’ and ‘Tiger
Rag’. A Historiographic Revision (Lucca: LIM, 2011); Swing e Groove. Sui fondamenti estetici delle musiche audio-
tattili (Lucca: LIM, 2014).
3 See Benjamin Givan, “Historical and Cultural Background”, in this volume, note 4. One of the elements that
most strongly marks anthropological dynamics in general is the continual cultural modification produced by
encounters with other cultures, and the history of musical traditions is no exception. The perception of a radical
and dramatic anthropological reconfiguration of traditional cultures within the contemporary technologically
mediatised world is among the questions raised by Philip V. Bohlman in his World Music. A Very Short Introduc-
tion (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 21 ff. «As it becomes popular music, world music appropriates the past and tradition
to effect a radical break with them». And again: «The question, however, is whether this post-colonial and post-
modern encounter is effectively different from any earlier encounter» [my emphasis]. I interpret this mutation,
due to an encounter with the technological universe dominated by neo-auratic processes of codification (see
In describing the operational practices and conceptual schemes through which this cultural
hybridization came about, instead, I would like to propose one specific and innovative element,
directly related to my Theory of Audiotactile Formativity. The factors involved in a dynamics of
hybridization can in fact – to introduce at present a few concepts that will be illustrated in fur-
ther detail in section 1.2 – be considered to depend on the one hand on a musical culture whose
cognitive matrix is visual (in this case consisting in J.S. Bach’s compositional practice and the
aesthetic values that inhere in its form of musical knowledge and representation, as objectified
in the Concerto BWV 1043), and on the other on what I define as audiotactile mediation (the
three jazz musicians’ particular form of cognitive activity and formativity).
Even while differing in their ethnic and geographical origins, South and the two Francopho-
nes were able to rely on the same cognitive approach. This is because their anthropological and
identitarian profile depended on cultural criteria that were both intrinsic to their (audiotactile)
perceptive and cognitive experience, and technologically mediatised, by mass communication,
to a much greater extent than by structures that can be defined as biological-genetic and/or tied
to local ethnic traditions. The path followed by Reinhardt and Grappelli in cultivating their
abilities as jazz musicians thus entirely consisted in phonographic mediation, in that neither of
them had as yet had a direct in loco contact with the North American jazz community.4
A further point of interest consists in a few considerations regarding textual anthropology.
The phenomenological negotiation enacted by the trio seems to develop on many levels, from
the point of view of textual anthropology and its interpretative practices as well. This allows us
to identify an exemplary dynamics that can be studied with the methods, paradigms and theo-
retical perspectives pertaining to a transcultural musicology. To understand the criteria adopted
in the following discussion, however, it is necessary to briefly introduce a few concepts of the
Theory of Audiotactile Formativity.
1.2. Some basic Concepts of the Theory of Audiotactile Formativity

The Theory of Audiotactile Formativity (TAF)5 aims at outlining a taxonomy of musical
systems and experiences from an anthropological and musicological point of view, by identi-
fying the perceptive/cognitive implications of their determiners and cultural mediations. This
below, section 1.2.2), as a radical transformation leading from an oral to an audiotactile tradition.
4 As we shall see (in section 1.2.2), according to the TAF, the configuration of identitarian dynamics comes
about for the three musicians through the mediological set of effects produced by neo-auratic encoding (NAE),
the cognitive model that derives from the communicational mediation of sound recording, through which they
had assimilated their improvisational abilities and their stylistic references.
5 In the case of the present research, the TAF carries out another important function that is inherent to the
epistemology of jazz studies, from a theoretical perspective that however implies developments that go be-
yond the purposes of this essay. Jazz studies (similarly to rock or popular music studies) seem in fact to con-
tain an epistemological vulnus in that they are based on implicit but not demonstrated premises, systems of
assumptions that are not necessarily part of a broader musicological outlook. A few of these presuppositions
are that jazz musicians enjoy certain prerogatives and use strategies that differ from those used by classically
trained musicians, in a way that is not however specified in detail; that a system of practical and theoretical
conventions, tacitly shared by insiders, exists; that the history of jazz is mediatised (with no consensus as to
how) by the dynamics of recording production and distribution, and so on. It is as though both formal analyses
and aesthetic discourses were carried out within a community that shares and comprehends its own cultural
presuppositions, overlooking the phenomenological foundations of these assumptions, which could include
them within a more comprehensive musicological outlook thus resting on foundations that are shared by
other kinds of musicology. If these anthropological and epistemological dynamics are the norm in traditional
cultures, when applied to a musical tradition such as jazz, which has an extended and historicised theoretical
substructure of its own, they can leave one somewhat perplexed. One of the efforts made by the TAF aims at
providing the phenomenological bases of these premises, remaining within the tacit conventions of jazz and
setting its perceptive and cognitive experiences within wider categories.
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Phenomenological and Musical Analysis
representation owes much of its methodology to issues and operative concepts elaborated with-
in mediology.6 In this realm of thought, a decisive role in defining fundamental gnoseologi-
cal criteria is given to a specific conception of the communicative/formative “medium” (which,
in linguistics and semiotics, is fundamentally opposed to the notion of the communicational
“channel”), considered to be non-neutral as regards the way in which messages are configured
and received. Therefore, the primary emphasis goes to the dynamic function that the epistemic
principles incorporated in the medial layout (through which cultural constructs are produced
and communicated) exert on the symbolic and morphological traits of the constructs them-
selves, as well as on the reconfiguration of the perceptual conditions and conceptual schemes of
those who produce and receive them. In other words, the most interesting aspect of a given me-
dium consists in the cognitive and psycho-perceptive effects that it brings into play, inasmuch as
every medium, on the basis of its own intrinsic configuration and constitution, defines a specific
model of cognition/perception. The TAF identifies two fundamental media: on the one hand,
the dual medium that defines Western music notation and theory (responsible for both the form
taken by perception and cognition in classical/romantic/modern art music and the contempo-
rary pedagogic-didactic structures that conserve and transmit this tradition) and on the other
the audiotactile principle (ATP; see 1.2.1), the bodily psychosomatic medium that is inherent in
both oral music traditions and in audiotactile music properly speaking (whose main examples are
the jazz, rock, pop and world music traditions). In audiotactile music, with respect to traditional
music understood through its historicised image,7 a distinctive role is also played by neo-auratic
encoding, i.e. the sum of cognitive and aesthetic effects that derive from the specific way in which
these repertories developed, entirely within processes of phonographic mediation (see 1.2.2).
1.2.1. The Audiotactile Principle (ATP)

Conceiving the notion of an audiotactile principle in its identity as a psycho-somatic carrier of
a specific way of conceiving and understanding music may not initially seem to be entirely exact,
in that its phenomenology is extremely widespread in cultures across the world, and can thus be
defined as an environment, a cognitive/experiential frame that as such, as McLuhan would say,
is anthropologically invisible.8 The fact is that the ATP, from a diachronic point of view, takes
on its distinctive conceptual sense, noetically configuring itself as a cultural unit, at the very mo-
ment in which the history of Western music established a process of exosomatic externalisation
of its own experiential and formative prerogatives, with the dual system of musical notation/
6 See, among other texts, Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of the Typographic Man (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1962); Id., Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1964); Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, The Laws Of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1988); Derrick De Kerckhove, Technology, Mind and Business (Utrecht: Bosch & Keuning,
1991). This “mediological” front, that gives the utmost attention to the ideological and noetically pre-es-
tablished means with which we communicate (for example, language itself, or technological devices such as
writing, in its innumerable socio-historical variants), could however be integrated with a series of diversified
approaches derived from the works of thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Benjamin
Lee Whorf, Edward Sapir, Lev S. Vygotskij, Jürgen Habermas and many others.
7 Documentation provided by the ethnomusicological tradition over the second half of the 20th century has fixed
this historicised image, through so-called processes of “patrimonialization” of cultural heritage.
8 «Environments are invisible», Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the mAssage (New York:
Bantam Books, 1967), 84-85. To discover the essence of the ATP, just like any other “environment” for that
matter, including musical notation for those who have cultivated its use, it is necessary to engage in the “defa-
miliarisation” theorised by Viktor Šklovskij (see “Iskusstvo kak priëm”, 1917, Eng. trans. “Art as technique” in
J. Rivkin, M. Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory. An Anthology (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1998) or to subject it to
a phenomenological reduction (see Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New
York: Routledge, 2002) (1st ed. 1931).
121
theory,9 considered according to the specific abstractive and Cartesian internal logic that shapes
it. Therefore, it is this latter system that “appeared” as a new element, a factor that introduced
a separation within the integrated experience of music across the world, in the same way that,
with the appearance of the notion of composition, the idea of improvisation was also formed,
which is unthinkable and does not emerge in traditional oral cultures.10
From a synchronic point of view, the ATP can therefore be understood as an active interface
and a psycho-corporeal cognitive medium that, within a mediological interpretative framework,
induces a mode of knowing and representing music that is coherent with its own organic con-
ditions, and therefore identifies a noetic model intrinsically connected to a specific corporeal
rationality.11 This audiotactile cognitivity takes shape independently from representations that
are exosomatic, normative and indebted to formalised theoretical systems (or, it implements it-
self by reducing their operative and aesthetic scope, or again by functionally encompassing them
within its own cognitive space, as is clear from its functionality in musical traditions that origi-
nated in the 20th century, such as jazz or rock). In particular, I am referring to those theoretical
frameworks (such as Western music theory) that use systems of rules based on combinations
of discrete units to produce texts and model their own axiomatic criteria, their own operative
system and their own specific internal logic on epistemological categories such as linearity, the
segmentation of experience, the homogenisation of categories, uniform repeatability and quan-
titative reductionism: abstractive principles that justify the technology of Western musical no-
tation (and not, for example, the Indian notation of karnatic music) and the theoretical system
that accompanies it, both of which I define, inasmuch as they are a result of the symbolic form
of the sense of sight, as belonging to a visual cognitive matrix.
For example, the Western system of musical notation/theory can be defined as a media-steered
subsystem, to use a term coined by Jürgen Habermas,12 that neglects endosomatic cognitive traits
in favour of exosomatic ones, i.e. rational, classificatory, abstractive, logical-combinatorial and
efficiency-oriented. It thus gives way to the allographic nature of music, founding a primacy of
text over gesture and a consequent specialisation and functional separation between composer
and interpreter. The latter defines his own identity by adhering to a system, and to the way it
is explicated in the concrete production of music, of which it does not govern the intimate
creative coordinates, even while authentically and legitimately aspiring to a degree of freedom:
coordinates that on the contrary are indebted to normative functions and superordinate power
dynamics.13 Even if, in the living artistic practices of the previous century, these dynamics and
functions suffered a strong attack carried out by artistic movements originating within the lear-
ned Western tradition, one must not forget that still today this ideology dominates the pedago-
gical and didactic aspects of Western music.
The audiotactile principle, on the contrary, with its inclination towards a top-down approach,
actualises within an artistic and communicative action the utopia of a system whose rules are
holistically induced by the individual, via his own endosomatic mediation and a contextualised
and interactive negotiation. In this way, one can apply to music what Karl Jaspers ascribes to
“original presence”, according to which music would no longer take the form, in its theoretical
representation itself, of both an object and a reified fact, quantified in the mathematical terms of
9 From an ontogenetic point of view, on the contrary, this phenomenon appears to be related to the individual
processes through which musical literacy is acquired, or the repressed psycho-corporeal memory that results
from the psycho-somatic rationalisation put in effect by the didactics of instrumental techniques.
10 See V. Caporaletti, I processi improvvisativi, cit., 92 ff.
11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013) (1st ed.
1942); Id., Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) (1st ed. 1945).
12 Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action. Life World and System, Vol. 2 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1988)
13 Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits (4 voll.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).
122
Western music theory, but would receive its own sense from a disposition according to which
«[…] as regards observation, the object is no longer the thing, but the subject-object-relation
(Subjekt-Objekt-Verhältnis) as a whole».14 That which is set into action is thus a corporeally
mediated phenomenological form of knowledge/experience of musical processes, for example
with a concrete formative and aesthetic affirmation of morphological inductors of sensorimotor
energy, that cannot be controlled in their temporal micro-structure by an intentional/ratio-
nal disposition (involving factors which cannot be noetically apprehended by Western music
theory, and which receive various names in the ethnic theories of many kinds of world music:
in jazz, groove, swing, drive, participatory discrepancies, behind or ahead of the beat, but also
laykārī in Hindustan music, balanço in Afro-Brazilian music, répriz and lokans in the music of
Guadeloupe, ombak in the Indonesian gamelan tradition, etc.).15 These sensorimotor phenomena
only become possible when the sense of time and the pulsation that governs it are freed from
objectifying exosomatic restrictions, as a result of the quantitative and mechanical reification
of time brought about by the metronome, connecting instead the propulsion, in its own metric
substrate,16 to the lived phenomenological experience of the body, inserting it in the vital and
energetic order of natural rhythms. Furthermore, with the vital mediation of the ATP, when
projected to the level of macro-form, the existential veritative essence becomes relevant, with
primary value going to creativity in the immediacy of the living moment, as offered by processes
of musical extemporisation and improvisation. The creative, holistic and endosomatic nature of
the ATP furthermore rejects the ontological distinction between interpreter and composer, or
takes it up in a new regime of authorial sharing.
In addition to physical-gestural mediation, however, in improvised creation psychic media-
tion is also highly important; alongside its de facto connections with the former, its constitutive
and pre-eminent values involve empathy (feeling) and interaction as a way of discovering the
other (interplay), reaching a contextual intuition that is able to foresee the way in which the
performance, and more generally the becoming of the event, will unfold. It is important to
remember that only in a situation in which corporeality becomes an active part of cognitive
activity, primarily responsible for this entirely peculiar way of understanding and representing
music (but not only music), does it become audiotactile: otherwise, a similarly physical approach
would inevitably be subsumed under a visual and normocentric cognitive order, exosomatically
codified, as is the case with historicised attestations of written and learned Western musical
civilisation.
1.2.2. Neo-Auratic Encoding (NAE)

The production of some types of music based on the audiotactile formative medium is highly
dependant on the “processing” of texts carried out by recordings (“texts” being understood in the
widest possible anthropological sense, referring to both single expressions17 of kinds of music
14 Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Springer 1954, 4th ed.), 21 [Author’s trans.].
15 For an in-depth comparative analysis of these psychomotor effects, see V. Caporaletti, Swing e Groove, cit.
16 Not only, therefore, in a way that tends to be meta-metric and rhapsodicaly “expressive”, erroneously interpret-
ed by the tradition of Western art music to be the chosen perspective from which to affirm an active subjectiv-
ity in the freedom of a living temporal experience, as opposed to the supposed “cage”, isochrone and restrictive,
of measured music (surreptitiously exorcised in a context dominated by its visual matrix, where a vitalistic and
creative synaesthetic and audiotactile attitude is lacking) (for a discussion of these aspects, see V. Caporaletti,
Swing e Groove, cit.). Obviously, the ATP also operates in non metric structures, as can be seen in innumerable
examples from various musical traditions (avaz in Iranian music, ālāp in the Hindustan tradition, taqsîm in the
Arab world; or again, in European free music and in aleatory music). In these cases – unlike the overarching
lines of visually oriented music, that reifies the objective-compositional given – the existential prerogative must
in any case go to the subject-object-relation taken as a whole.
17 Bruno Nettl defines these as objectifications of “units of musical conceptualization” (cfr. Bruno Nettl, The Study
123
that depend on a notation whose codes are more or less “open”, and a dimension that involves
live creativity). The results of this processing acquire a definitive textual status, a phono-fixation,
that induces mediological effects on an aesthetic level, acting in many ways similarly (retaining,
all the while, firm roots in an evenemential/audiotactile performative milieu) to the crystallisa-
tion of notation projected over long spans of time that is typical of “written” composition with
individualised authorship as found in the educated Western tradition. The possibility of using
the medium of sound recordings as a creative instrument generates, within audiotactile music,
consequences of a cognitive nature (which are also active in relation to performances not subject
to recording): these effects are reflected on its aesthetic image, as distinctive traits when compa-
red to music from traditional/oral cultures.
Oral tradition repertories, that are equally based on the ATP, did not take shape over the
course of their historical evolution across the formative medium of sound recordings, which
intercepted only them after the fact, as an ethnomusicological and documentary factor (with
the exception of the contemporary developments of these traditions, as will be discussed below).
Audiotactile music, that takes in the repertories of jazz, rock, pop, contemporary world music as
well as their intersections with other semiotic systems, has on the contrary been permeated by
the influence of the medium of phonographic recording in its musical conception and formal
developments themselves. The theoretical structure and cognitive modality that derive from
these dynamics have been described by the author of the present text with the notion of neo-
auratic encoding (NAE),18 in direct contrast with the idea of the loss of the aura in the work of
art in the age of mechanical reproduction, as theorised by Walter Benjamin in 1936.19
While there is no doubt that with technological reproducibility one must relinquish the
work’s hic et nunc, it is equally true that those aspects that can be attributed to the audiotactile
principle find in sound recording the means with which to fix a number of significant indices
of the processual/phenomenological qualities that re-establish, for these musical formations, a
new model of “auraticity” by way of the technological support. This objective textualisation, that
distances musical form from the evanescence by which it is marked in oral cultures, gives audio-
tactile music access to the categories of modern Western aesthetics – authorial identity, creative
originality and mobility of aesthetic norms, autonomy of the work, non-functional reception –
and cancels, to all intents and purposes, the distinction between popular and art music.
The technological “transcription”/inscription of the ATP, and thus its phono-graphic fixa-
tion in correlation with processes of NAE – or the awareness of the “inherent” possibility of
this crystallisation, in terms of symbolic interactionism, as a potentiality of phono-fixation even
when an intentional phonographic processing is not present20 – delineates the phenomenolo-
gical terrain on which the quintessential conditions of audiotactile music, properly speaking,
appear. The problem that contemporary ethnomusicology must tackle is that in a technological
globalisation based on information and electronics, oral traditions – turned into a heritage and
“frozen” at the moment in which oralism was phono-fixed for the first time, during the ethno-
musicological impact of the 20th century – are definitively disappearing, thus acquiring the traits
of audiotactile music themselves, under the form of world music, establishing neo-auratic co-
gnitive models and thus sparking off intensive processes of transformation that are entirely new
with respect to those seen in the past.
of Ethnomusicology. Thirty-one Issues and Concepts (Urbana-Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 113.
18 See Caporaletti 2002, cit., 34; 2005, cit., 121 ff.
19 See Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, in: Id., Gesammelte
Schriften 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955 [1936]).
20 For example, in music played live, the possibility of a phono-fixation carried out by members of the audience,
with commonly used digital devices.
124
1.2.3. Extemporisation vs. Improvisation

Research on improvisational practices has opened up, in the 20th century, developments that
identify specific subdivisions within ex tempore creative practices, generically defined as “impro-
visation”. In I processi improvvisativi nella musica (2005) I demonstrated the existence of real-
time creative processes, with a direct formal/phonographic crystallisation, which on the basis of
their cultural and anthropological codes would not be labelled as improvisation by any insider.
Following an enquiry on the phenomenological status of these sound events, I delineated the
semantic field surrounding the notion of extemporisation, in a general and systemic sense.
In principle, one can speak of extemporisation with respect to performative processes that
foresee the mediation of a mental construct defined as a model – irrespectively, therefore, of the
score, understood as a reference device provided with specific technological characteristics and
textual authority – whose direct audiotactile implementation comes about as an extemporary
process. In reality, extemporisation is a performance-based objectification (analogous but not
identical to the “interpretation” of a score) in real time of a mental construct, the Model, anthro-
pologically defined and culturally transmitted, that normatively speaking does not partake of
the same binding character that is taken on by a written text in a werktreue Ideal regime. Even
though it is an ex tempore process, strictly speaking the practice is not recognised as |improvi-
sation| by the members of the anthropological community in question (whether they belong to
the jazz community21 or to other ethnically and geographically defined anthropological bodies).
In this sense, a distinct line can be drawn between the semantic unit of improvisation on the
one hand, that implies processes aimed at elaborating the Model and introducing new material
(a practice that I have theoretically articulated into A and B processes),22 within an aesthetic
orbit that pursues the values of innovation and originality, and interpretation on the other. This
latter, opposing semantic unit concerns the performative realisation of a project codified via a
notation characterised by a greater or lesser degree of indetermination (this practice, in turn, is
culturally subject to a greater or lesser adherence to the authority of the score, defining the de-
gree of the “field of dispersion” of the notated text: a field that becomes ever more limited along
the historical trajectory encompassing classical, romantic and modernist music, and is broader
in baroque, pre-baroque and contemporary music stemming from the written tradition).
Extemporisation can therefore be defined (in a technical and systematic sense, as opposed to
improvisation) in various ways:
• the direct sonorous instantiation of a Model (whose consistency is imaginative, and given
by tradition);
• a specific case of “interpretation” of either a piece with no pre-written notated referent, or
a pre-written text with “limited jurisdiction”, scarcely binding (when the latter is the case,
as in jazz or New Music, it is mediologically subsumed under audiotactile formativity, in
which the normative logic of the gesture aesthetically prevails over the text);
• the form of the constitutive process of textual codification (but not elaboration) in music
regulated by audiotactile formativity;
• in terms of information theory, with respect to the normative interpretation of the written
tradition, extemporisation can be defined according to the level of informativity present
in the performance process, that is, the potential amount of possible choices; this set of
possibilities is different in both degree and substance (quantity and quality) compared to
21 For the notion of “jazz community”, see Alan Merriam and Raymond W. Mack, “The Jazz Community“, «So-
cial Forces» (38, 3, 1960): 211-222.
22 For the A and B typologies of improvisational processes, see Vincenzo Caporaletti, “Ghost Notes”. Issues
of Inaudible Improvisations”, in R. Rasch (ed.), Beyond Notes. Improvisation in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 345-373: 363.
125
the one conditioned by an adhesion to the control object (the score) in the Western tradi-
tion of written/art music.
Extemporisation is not simply an expressive variant of the text, as in the interpretation of
European art music from the 18th to the mid-20th century; rather, it takes on a constitutive
function with respect to the latter, via the ATP. It goes without saying that the true notion of
|improvisation| is a recent concept, dating to the 20th century, in which the prerogative over the
elaboration of material, previously given to the compositional tradition, has been transferred to a
specific audiotactile formativity, drawing on the phenomenological legalisation of such practices
implemented by neo-auratic encoding.
1.3. Interprétation Swing and Improvisation: Phenomenology of the Practices

In the light of this succinct description of the key notions of the Theory of Audiotactile
Formativity, we can now examine the phenomenology of the South/Grappelli/Reinhardt jazz
trio’s recordings of music by Bach. Anticipating some of the conclusions that we will reach, it
is worth noting that the validity of the methodology used is confirmed not only on a general
level of phenomenological negotiation, but also as regards concrete analytical observations. In
fact, with respect to the binary disjunction between interpretation and improvisation, that in
1937 served to map the operational field we are presently analysing (the two categories, for that
matter, persist still today), we will be able to identify at least four different levels of operativity.
From the perspective of cognitive anthropology, the most natural place to begin is the noetic
model shared by the three musicians. Precisely because all three are eminent representatives of
jazz culture, we can assume23 that with these pieces we are no doubt facing an implementation
of the model of cognition/categorisation that I define audiotactile, as a specific form of bodily/
somatic rationality. One immediately interesting feature of this particular case is that Bach’s
BWV 1043, that is, the text interpreted24 with an audiotactile approach, is transculturally con-
noted: rather than being an intrinsic expression of audiotactile culture (in which case it would
be cognitively processed with epistemic coherence, meaning that the structural criteria of the
text would be homologous with the musicians’ model of decoding), it fully belongs to Western
written musical culture, whose cognitive matrix is “visual”. There is therefore a certain dystonia25
in the decoding, between the codes used by the sender (Bach) and the interpreter (the trio), that
generates interesting aesthetic effects.
From the point of view of the text’s decoding (and therefore the cognitive/interpretative mo-
dalities set in motion), even within the sphere of a common audiotactile cognitive model, dif-
ferent strategies seem to be adopted by the three musicians: the text (Bach’s BWV 1043) was
decoded by Reinhardt by way of a sound/phonographic recording,26 thus bypassing its written
codification.27 In section 2.3, Reinhardt’s concrete deciphering in harmonic terms of Bach’s
23 On jazz’s specific features as audiotactile music, see at least V. Caporaletti, Swing e Groove, cit.
24 “Interpreted” in its twofold sense of “decoded” and “performed”.
25 It is superfluous to add that, in this case, the use of the term “dystonia” has no pejorative sense whatsoever, and
on the contrary objectively describes a concrete state of affairs. Actually, the mechanism in question is generally
described in semiotics as an “aberrant decoding” (a notion introduced by Umberto Eco in La struttura assente
(Milano: Bompiani 1968), 102, which is every bit as objectively descriptive and free from axiological conno-
tations).
26 J. S. Bach, Double Concerto in Ré Mineur, BWV 1043, Yehudi Menuhin, George Enescu (vl), Orchestre Sym-
phonique de Paris, Pierre Monteux (dr), Victor 78 rpm, Album DM 932 (1932).
27 «Django transcribed a harmonic accompaniment by ear» (Michael Dregni, Django: The Life and the Music of a
Gipsy Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 137). Dregni uses the word «transcribed», but this
is no more than an effect of the conceptual mediation of language: no other terms are available to indicate a
practice that is inexpressible for Western music theory. In reality, Django did not tran-scribe anything at all:
he represented, extemporising, a figural harmonic model with an imaginative consistency which he desumed
126
thorough bass, which functions as a Model to be extemporised, will be discussed. On the other
hand, the two violinists, even though they had varying proficiency in musical literacy, approa-
ched the written text via its regular notational coding.28
As regards the performative recoding (and the performance practices implied), the two re-
cordings present different characteristics. Concerning the guitarist, in both Interprétation and
Improvisation we seem to be faced with an extreme case, due to his complete musical illiteracy.
For this reason, a score that is accurately spelt out in musical notation – and therefore normati-
vely subject to interpretation – becomes a mental model, by way of the recording, once it has been
aurally synthesised; extemporisational processes are therefore activated as regards the performing
recoding, which will be illustrated in detail in section 2.3.
For Grappelli and South, the picture is more complex. On the one hand, the two violinists
engage in apparently normative processes of interpreting the Concerto BWV 1043, by reading
and reproducing the score, with an ordinary or conventional degree of interpretative leeway. As
is the rule, here the bar is temporally subdivided in a rational/mathematical way, even if this is
done in an expressive way, with the eighth notes taking on a normatively homogeneous duration
(see Ex. 1).
Example 1. Interprétation, bb. 23-27. The two violinists play with a normal subdivision of the crotchet
into two quavers with an equal duration (no Long/Short), in a conventional process of interpretation
of the score
In a few passages of the performance of the score, however, while remaining within the limits
of an interpretation of Bach’s text, and not as yet improvising, South and Grappelli disregard
the aesthetic criteria of the werktreue Ideal, the implicit imperative (for cultures with a visual
matrix) of a mandatory acceptance of the written dictates of the score, prevailing as of the
mid-19th century. Now, one of the consequences of the audiotactile cognitive approach consists
precisely in this particular method of decoding, with the score being mediologically subsumed into
a formative order with foreign origins, that generates peculiar and often quite specific formal
phenomena, with a correlated affirmation of certain aesthetic values. On a micro-rhythmic scale,
for example, the so-called swing eighths inflection comes across:29 the inégale articulation,30 with
from neo-auratic processes, through a psychophysical audiotactile implementation on the instrument.

28 This situation allows us to clarify an aspect that is often misunderstood, with respect to the dynamics of
audiotactile music. With respect to the mediological function, one must distinguish whether a medium has
an experiential formative function, i.e. if it has a determining and qualifying effect in shaping sensory and
cognitive aspects, or if it is simply a technological means subsumed under a cognitive order that is dissimilar
to its own epistemic principles. For example, there is no exclusive correspondence between semiography and a
visual cognitive matrix: even a score, the product par excellence of the visual musical culture in which it assumes
a formative role, can be subsumed as an instrument within an audiotactile mode of perception and categori-
sation, as happens regularly in practices of jazz and pop. Naturally, this changes the rules and the criteria with
which the technology of notation receives epistemic values in the two distinct domains.
29 This convention of subdividing the tactus, in addition to the way in which Reinhardt makes the isochronous
continuous pulse explicit, with the metric accents displaced to the even beats (backbeat), appears to be respon-
sible for the sense of the title of the piece, Interprétation Swing.
30 On the analogies and differences between Baroque inegalité and the Long/Short formula used in swing artic-
127
the Long-Short model of the two quavers into which the beat is supposedly subdivided. Another
aspect that takes shape, organised into well-defined systems of distinctive traits, consists in the
typical performative modes of microtemporal delay or anticipation with respect to the pulse (in
the latter case giving the continuous pulsation, which is elastically made explicit by the guitar,
the impression of «a train that proceeds at a constant speed but [that] is nonetheless pulled by
its locomotive»).31 In the present case, in which the two violinists are dealing with a text coming
from the visual tradition (the Concerto BWV 1043), these effects represent a non-normative
interpretation, given their adherence to a score without being subject, however, on the micro-
rhythmic/expressive level, to semiographic conventions and historicised aesthetic and stylistic
canons. This is because the rhythmic-intervallic string remains intact and the text’s structurality
thus continues to be integral,32 while the artifices introduced on a micro-temporal scale such as
swing or groove are only apparently expressive and not substantial (these devices however, in an
audiotactile regime, take on a fully structural value as regards the definition of textual properties,
in line with jazz’s stylistic traits)33 (see Ex. 2).
Example 2. Improvisation, bb. 24-28. In the same passage as the previous example, the pairs of quavers
are now played with the Long/Short rhythmic formula (swing eighths), in what can be called a non-
normative interpretation
ulation, see V. Caporaletti, Swing e Groove, cit., 240 ff.

31 This is a famous metaphor for swing formulated by André Hodeir, one of the first researchers to fully describe
the phenomena tied to swinging energy, in V. Caporaletti, Swing e Groove, cit., 55 ff.
32 Obviously, with the exception of an ordinary amount of space for creative interpretative intervention, that in
Examples 1 and 2 emerges with the appearance of articulations and embellishments. For the notion of the
structure of a notational text see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968) (in
particular, chapters IV and V).
33 We must recall that the conditio sine qua non for these sensorimotor phenomena to take shape is the implicit or
concretely explicit (as in the case at hand, thanks to Reinhardt) presence of the process of pulsation articulated
with that particular form of psychosomatic cohesion that Richard Waterman defined metronome sense (see
Richard Waterman, “African Influence on the Music of the Americas”, in Sol Tax (ed.), Acculturation in the
Americas (New York: Cooper Square, 1952). In the terms I have developed, these phenomena require a vitalis-
tically and existentially connoted pulsational conduct, free from all “exosomatic objectifying restrictions” that
result from the energetic reification put into effect by the visual cognitive matrix of Western art music (see sec-
tion 1.2.1). Swing is not created by syncopation and the metric conception that underlies it in Western music
theory, but by the endosomatic nature of the temporality expressed by the audiotactile principle. This was the
opinion formulated by Alfons M. Dauer, who in the 1950s criticised the «Mißdeutung des Jazz als “synkop-
ierte” Musik» («misunderstanding of jazz as “syncopated” music», see V. Caporaletti, Swing e Groove, cit., 81),
as did Waterman himself, who avoided the ideological and conceptual predeterminations that are inherent in
the notion of the “syncope” preferring the formula «off-beat phrasing of melodic accents» (for a discussion of
these aspects, see V. Caporaletti, “Lo swing, l’off-beat e la trance rituale. La relazione Dauer-Carpitella”, «AAA
TAC. Acoustical Arts and Artifacts. Technology, Aestethics and Communication», n. 8 (2013): 20 ff.). This
reasoning is also valid in cases of visually oriented music that presents apparent analogies with the audiotactile
continuous pulse, in the conduct of their (isochronous) regulative pulsation, as is the case in many examples of
Baroque music (this ambiguity has led to many aesthetic misunderstandings, including, perhaps, the reasons
that led Delaunay to propose Bach’s Concerto for a jazz version). In this light, the position expressed by John
Mehegan in 1962, according to which «the performance of a Bach fugue, a Strauss waltz, a Sousa march, or a
rhythm and blues recording – each can be said to swing within its own context», is quite problematic (see V.
Caporaletti, Swing e Groove, cit., 273 ff.).
128
One should note that this reconversion of durations, introducing as it does new anthropolo-
gical effects (the psychomotor energy emically known as swing) that are foreign to both the co-
dification of the source (Bach’s text) and the stylistic sphere in question (Baroque music), takes
place within a regime in which temporality has different connotations than in written European
music and the culture that accompanies it.
In those passages in which Grappelli and South decode the written text, on the contrary,
as though it had the phenomenological legality34 of a mnemonic model (that is, neither nor-
matively nor a-normatively reproducing the score, nor inventing new material ex tempore, but
“paraphrasing” it, to use Hodeir’s35 well-known categorisation), keeping for the most part to
this model as it is configured, free from procedures of elaborating the material, extemporising
processes are set into motion. On a macro-rhythmic scale, for example, syncopation effects are
introduced, the magnitude and the distribution of the durations is changed, elisions of notes
with little structural relevance take place, other notes appear as embellishments, or again the
metric position of the notes is altered with anticipations, suspensions etc. (see Ex. 3).
Example 3. Comparison between the Solo violin part (first four measures) in Bach’s original version
and the extemporisations introduced by Grappelli and South. (The metre of the original version has
been reformulated to allow for a transcultural comparison.)
Lastly, during moments in which, even while referring to the framework of the Model, the
two violinists add new material (or subtract it) over the course of their elaboration, giving axio-
logical relevance to the values of creative originality, we encounter truly improvisational practi-
ces (in this case, given that the Model has been set out beforehand and not itself created ad hoc
in real time, it could be categorised as Type A)36 (see Ex. 4).
Example 4. The four measures of the previous example, subjected to improvisation
Other consequences of this audiotactile recoding of the score, on a larger architectonic scale,
include repercussions on the structure of the orchestration itself. This necessarily produces a
34 One must not confuse this “legality”, that abides by the authoritative status of the model – which in itself is
limited in the creative dynamics of oral cultures and audiotactile music – with the simple act of memorising a
text coming from a culture whose cognitive matrix is visual, in Western art music. In the latter, the memorised
text continues to have absolute authority and a binding nature.
35 For a critique of the notion of the paraphrase in jazz taxonomies, see Benjamin Givan, “Jazz Taxonomies” «Jazz
Research News», 10 (2003): 472 ff.
36 See V. Caporaletti, “Ghost Notes”, cit., 363.
129
reduced version of an originally orchestral score, with a consequent reduction of the number of
parts, in particular the omission of the viola part.37
To conclude, in Interprétation we can observe three modalities of performative phenome-
nology implemented by Grappelli and South: interpretation, non-normative interpretation and
extemporisation. In Improvisation, on the contrary, no less than four operative levels are in play:
interpretation, non-normative interpretation, extemporisation and improvisation, all of which are
put in relation with Reinhardt’s rhythmically implemented extemporisation of the harmonic
model.
2. Technical and Musical Aspects
2.1. Large-Scale Formal Structures
a) The Concerto BWV 1043

Before we begin to explore the formal structure of Interprétation and Improvisation, some
clarifications should be made as to their morphological relations with the first movement of
the Concerto in D minor for two violins BWV 1043 by J.S. Bach. This celebrated work, that
recent historiography tends to attribute to Bach’s “Leipzig period” rather than, as was believed
in the past, the time that Bach spent in Cöthen, has been dated by Christoph Wolff to appro-
ximately 1730.38 A typical Baroque concerto in three movements, its instrumental forces most
notably include a pair of violins. The first movement (which is the one that interests us here)
uses the characteristic ritornello form that Bach was acquainted with above all due to his study
and transcription of works by Antonio Vivaldi: a structural model on which Bach imposed his
own personality and genius, using passages in fugal form.
In order to understand the formal relations between Bach’s text and its jazz re-elaboration,
it is important to establish an analytic segmentation of the part of the first movement of the
Concerto that found its way into this adaptation (remembering that the two violinists read the
score – omitting the viola part, that is – over the “thorough bass” as performed by Reinhardt). In
particular, the segmentation carried out by the jazz trio involves the exposition of the Ritornello
of the first movement (Vivace) followed by the two violins’ solo passages (Solo), for a total of 29
bars of Bach’s score.39
The Ritornello, as notated, unfolds according to the criteria of a fugue, limited by Bach to
the Exposition section. This consists in a regular alternation of the subject40 and the answer (in
37 One must note that these formal stratifications generate highly specific fields of values: it is not enough for
swinging energy to be produced (which might, in the end, appear to be no more than a typical effect or an
expressive nuance, which could even be non-pertinent as regards the structural and aesthetic configuration
of the work). It is relevant, on the contrary, that these energetic-formal plexuses are organised into systems,
with distributions of distinctive traits, and thus generate significant structural systematics with corresponding
hierarchies of values, as much so as to constitute the sine qua non, the threshold to accede to aesthetic value.
38 Christoph Wolff, “Introduction” in J.S. Bach, Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, Strings and Continuo BWV
1043: Facsimile Edition of the Original Performing Parts with an Introduction by Christoph Wolff (New York: C.
F. Peters, 1990), 4. This dating is based not only on considerations as to the maturity of its writing, but also the
particular and original criterion used in its notation in dorian D, without a flat in the key signature instead of
the ordinary B flat, which cannot be ascribed to Bach’s years in Cöthen.
39 The numbering given to the bars in the original score is different from the one found in the retrospective
scores of Interprétation and Improvisation, as a result of our transcriptions of the recordings made by the Rein-
hardt-Grappelli-South trio. This is due to both the addition of an Introduction, lasting respectively three and
four bars, and reasons involving rhythmic-metric criteria that will be discussed in section 2.2. In the present
essay, the convention followed, wherever not expressly specified, is an indication between parentheses of Bach’s
numbering and without parentheses of the numbering used in the present Critical Edition.
40 This “subject” is classified by William Renwick, from a Schenkerian perspective, as paradigm 2b, with an
130
this case, a real answer, without the modifications that define a tonal answer) spanning four
bars (eight bars in our version). The subject is followed by a countersubject in step-wise motion,
whose melodic profile repeatedly lingers on the scale degrees that mark turning points in the
underlying harmonic structure. This is followed by the Solos, in which the first and then the
second violin alternate with virtuoso passages.
The ritornello-fugal exposition, along with the Solo parts, follows the formal and tonal outline
shown below (see Table 1: this segmentation is essential in understanding the three musicians’
decoding, particularly the “Inferred Key”, in order to extrapolate the basic structures with which
the subsequent improvisational processes are assembled).
Table 1. Schematic presentation of the part of the 1st movement of the Concerto BWV 1043 (Fugal
exposition/Ritornello + Solos) proposed by the jazz trio in Interprétation and Improvisation41
Let us now consider a few factors that are highly important for a decoding of Bach’s Con-
certo that is not excessively theory laden – according to canonic theoretical parameters, i.e. not
fashioned in line with analytical and formal criteria indebted to the music theory of Western
art music, of which the piece is an example – such as the one carried out by the jazz trio. This
kind of decoding, precisely for its low dependency on the theoretical models whose cognitive
basis is “visual”, rational/abstractive, that are intrinsic to learned Western codes, gives greater
value to formal elements that can be related to the activity of the psycho-sensory interface. For
example, for Reinhardt this could involve the harmonic “colour” of a given passage, rather than
the linear/contrapuntal identity that derives from its voice leading (the latter being a quality
that most readily emerges visually – and cognitively – in decoding the notational profiles of a
score), or again, during performance, the particular sensorimotor impulse that provides the basis
of its temporality. This cognitive approach, that I call audiotactile, was present regardless of the
degree to which the three musicians adhered to Western codes; for South it coexisted with a
Urlinie based on a stepwise descent from scale degree 8 to the lower tonic (see W. Renwick, Analysing Fugue. A
Schenkerian Approach (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1995), 44 ff.). As regards compositional influences,
Bach owes to Vivaldi not only the large-scale ritornello form, but also the inspiration for this subject, that seems
to be modelled on the opening bars of the Prelude of Vivaldi’s Suonata da camera a Tre Op. 1, n. 11.
41 In Improvisation, due to the extra bar in the Introduction, the bar numbering increases by one with respect to
Interprétation.
131
formal musical education, for Grappelli it was reconciled with a basic musical literacy and for
Reinhardt it represented a perfectly adequate expression of his complete musical illiteracy.42
In Bach’s piece, a few elements are intrinsically salient from a perceptive point of view. First
and foremost, the fugal structure with a real answer creates a gestalt quality of identity between
the subject and the answer, producing the effect of a continuous reappearance of the same me-
lodic profile when the various voices enter. Furthermore, one must remember that, when consi-
dering its aural perception, a contrapuntal texture characteristically presents mutations, in a way
that in any case differs from the typical layout of an accompanied melody. This means that, even
considering the structural homogeneity from a harmonic point of view of the various repeti-
tions of the A section – that moreover do not present, we repeat, on account of the real answer,
a differentiation between the melodic shape of the subject and the answer – the texture takes on
a different weight and phonic transparency according to whether the individual subject/answer
is found in the upper register (A [vl II], Ax [vl I]), in the lower (A [vlc]), or is set in the middle
and almost hidden by the dense contrapuntal writing (Ay [vla]). These considerations are quite
important to the purposes of an auditive analysis, to the point of becoming crucial in this case
for Reinhardt, in that an aural approach represented, as we have seen, his only possible access
to the piece.
Moreover, since this kind of approach came about via a phonographic mediation, one must
also consider a few perceptive questions raised by the standards of the time in sound recording/
reproducing, that tended to obscure the texture of the bass, leading, for example, to a loss of
thematic consistency (with consequences on the perception of formal coherence) in bars 10-13
of the Concerto (bars 22-29 of the transcription), in which the subject appears in the bass. Liste-
ning to the original recording43, one notices that the entry of the subject in the bass is extremely
faint, compared to the efflorescent counterpoint consisting in the countersubject and the free
counterpoint that emerges in the foreground. (We will come back to this fact, discussing some
of the interesting consequences it has on the guitarist’s realisation of the “thorough bass”.)
b) Large-scale formal structure in Interprétation and Improvisation
Interprétation
The piece begins with a “motto”, a brief three-bar motif that acts as an Introduction and is a
citation of the introductory and concluding fanfare from Armstrong’s Mahogany Hall Stomp.44
Charles Delaunay suggested this idea,45 maybe along the lines of a captatio benevolentiae inten-
ded for the audience, or an alienating frame that allusively underlines the playful spirit (with
an implicit act of deference towards the sacred auctoritas of the work by Bach to be presented
shortly thereafter) of a recording that many interpreted instead as an outright desecration.
42 For these reasons as well, from a methodological point of view, this Trio truly is an excellent case study for an
analysis of audiotactile functionality.
43 J.S. Bach, Double Concerto in Ré Mineur, 78 rpm Album DM 932, cit.
44 At the moment in which Interprétation was recorded, Armstrong had only made three recordings of Mahog-
any Hall Stomp, by Spencer Williams: March 5, 1929, OkeH 8680, matrix W 401691-B; January 28, 1933,
Victor 24232, matrix BS-75106-1; May 18, 1936, Decca 824, matrix 61111-A. In my opinion, the recording
to which Grappelli’s introduction refers is the one made in 1936, one and a half years before. In this version,
in fact, Armstrong changes the arrangement of the famous fanfare that evokes the street parade bands of New
Orleans, used as an Introduction and a Finale in the piece, in line with the more lively rhythmic-propulsive
conception that marks the 30s. In particular, above and beyond an increase in pace, going from the quarter
note at 171 in 1933, to 220 in 1936 (in line, that is, with the tempo of Interprétation), the new arrangement no
longer includes the suspended cymbals, dampened by hand, on the even beats, that however tended to make
this memorable “motto” less fluent.
45 See B. Givan, “Historical and Cultural Background” in this volume.
132
Somewhat oddly for a solo Introduction, that in the jazz performance tradition is entrusted
with setting the tempo and the rhythmic-metric base, the original four-bar phrase is in this case
asymmetrically truncated by the beginning of the piece in the fourth measure, without waiting
for the fourth bar of the “frame”. There is however a further interesting feature in this Introduc-
tion. In this case, it is charged with a very important function, that consists in identifying and
establishing the metre in which the jazz trio “decodes” the 18th century text46 and overlaps one
system of conventions upon the other.
The Introduction is followed by the Concerto’s Ritornello and the first two Solo interventions,
as in the score, remaining quite close to Bach’s writing on a rhythmic-intervallic level (except for
various routine embellishments and the omission of the 1th violin’s counterpoint to the 2nd vio-
lin’s Solo). The two violins deviate at some points (see below) from the rhythmic/metric norma-
tive regulation of the subdivision of the tactus, which is now idiomatically configured according
to the Long/Short jazz model (playing the two putative quavers into which the beat is subdivi-
ded as swing eighths, with the first quaver longer than the second).47 At the end of the two Solo
interventions, in bar 29 of the Concerto (bar 62 of the transcription), the formal model followed
by the trio waives the indications of the score by introducing a Da Capo, with, what is more, an
exchange in Grappelli and South’s performing roles. These two choices, that may appear to be a
complete distortion of the composition – and were imposed, at least as regards the resection of
the formal structure, by reasons involving recording production – are not however completely
without relation to Bach’s text. In fact, in bar 38 of the score the two violins actually do exchan-
ge their Solo parts, and furthermore the Da Capo evokes the effect of the reappearance of the
Ritornello after the section of the Solos (a repetition that in Bach however arrives further on, in
the Tutti at bar 46, within an architectural layout according to which this second appearance
of the Ritornello, similarly to the first real answer (section Ax), is presented at the upper fifth).
At the end of this “re-exposition” the trio leaps directly to bar 85 of Bach’s score, for the four-
bar Coda (that section A had re-proposed). Table 2 shows the architectonic configuration of the
piece.
Table 2. Formal layout of Interprétation

(the bars numbers in parentheses correspond to Bach’s original notation)
In passing, we should note that the formal “truncation” of the Concerto, obviously, must be
ascribed to the objective temporal limits of sound reproduction at the time (78 rpm records).
Improvisation
Here, the Introduction is entrusted to Reinhardt, has a regular four-bar length, and consists in
a free extemporisation of the rhythmic profile of the Mahogany Hall Stomp “motto”, played for
the most part in semi-diminished chords with chromatic treatment. Unlike the Interprétation,
this piece is comprised first by an obbligato part built around a single exposition of Bach’s fugal
Ritornello with the two violin Solos (see Table 3), and then by parts created in real time, properly
speaking.
46 See below, section 2.2 for further details on this matter.

47 This idiomatic “swinging” pronunciation could appear to be an unconscious – but not entirely out of place – re-
alisation of the Baroque practice of inegalité. For a discussion of the relations between this specific performance
modality and the notion of swing in jazz see V. Caporaletti, Swing e Groove, cit., 241 ff.
133
In this sense, the harmonic outlay of the Ritornello/Solo block is considered according to the
conventions of the jazz tradition as a “Theme”, even though the subsequent improvised solos
only use a few of its sections as a Referent or Model48 (see below).49
Table 3. Formal scheme of the obbligato part of Improvisation, that precedes the improvisations
After the presentation of this initial part of Bach’s Concerto, Delaunay would seem to have
removed the scores from the music stands, in order to encourage and induce improvised crea-
tion.50 But let us now see how the formal structure of the improvised part of Improvisation is or-
ganised. In reference to the scheme presented in Table 1, the sections chosen for improvisation
are, following our segmentation of Bach’s score, A (see Ex. 5) and B (see Ex. 6).
Example 5. J.S. Bach, Concerto BWV 1043. Section A, bb. 1-4 (Tutti). The Subject in D minor is
presented here by the 2nd violin51
48 Model, referent, matrix, preform, template, pattern phenomenon are all terms traditionally used in ethnomu-
sicology to designate the particular noetic construct that presides over, during oral creation, objective musical
determinations. For an adequate treatment of this topic, see V. Caporaletti, I processi improvvisativi, cit., 43 ff.
49 One must bear in mind that this segmentation follows Reinhardt’s cognitive model, that identified in particu-
lar the underlying harmonic structure of the various sections (virtually identical for sections A, Ax, Ay, that
in Bach’s composition are differentiated on the basis of their tonal characterisation), in spite of the fact that
the piece’s complex and multi-linear contrapuntal texture, visually considered, actually does not conform to a
schematisation of this type.
50 For a documentation of the circumstances surrounding Delaunay’s intervention, see B. Givan, “Historical and
Cultural Background” in this volume.
51 Our use of the Breitkopf & Härtel edition of Bach’s score ( J.S. Bach, Konzert in D Moll für Zwei Violinen,
Wilhelm Rust [hrsg. v.] Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe [Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1874], Band 21, 39-62,
from which examples 5 and 6 are taken) is not due to chance, but takes into account the 1932 recording of
the performance by Menuhin and Enescu (Victor 78 rpm DM 932; the aforementioned edition is the writ-
ten “source” of this recording). In that period, in fact, the Neue Bach-Ausgabe had not yet been published;
this complete critical edition of J. S. Bach’s works began to appear in the mid-50s and is still today the most
authoritative edition of Bach’s music. The editions available in 1932 were still derived from the 19th Century
Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe; in particular, this edition of the Concerto BWV 1043 was edited by Wilhelm
Rust, who also included the figuration of the thorough bass, with a numeration that is not found in the current
134
Example 6. J.S. Bach, Concerto BWV 1043. Section B, bb. 22-25. Solo part (Solo) of the 1st violin
The aggregation of these two sections generates a 32-bar AABB layout (note, again, that in
our transcription the number of bars is doubled), categorised by the trio, according to the codes
of jazz practice, as a chorus; this macro-formal model is played four times in all (‘rounded down’
the third time by omitting the second B, and ‘rounded up’ the fourth, with an additional A3
section. (See Table 4 for a summary of the improvised part, that includes the alternation of the
soloists).
Table 4. Improvisation. Scheme of the improvised part, with the four “choruses” and the alternation of
the soloists
2.2. Metric/Rhythmic and Micro-Rhythmic Criteria

All metric criteria, by way of their intrinsic theoretical qualities, become pertinent with musi-
cal writing: as Simha Arom has affirmed, the bar line appeared as a function of the technology
of notation.52 Now, retrospectively editing the score of a musical text, originally written in stan-
dard Western notation and subsequently subjected to audiotactile processes of extemporisation
and improvisation, raises a series of noteworthy problems.53 In particular, it is important to note
Bärenreiter edition, nor in the original, published as a facsimile by Peters, due to the loss of the Violone and
Cembalo part, which normally includes a numeration of the bass (see Wolff, Introduction, cit., 6).
52 See Simha Arom: “ […] Grouping beats into measures only became possible when the notion of the ‘measure’
as a graphic notation in the form of the bar invaded musical instruction in the course of seventeenth century
[…] this notion […] arose out of a mere graphic convention“, Id., African Polyphony & Polyrhythm. Musical
Structure and Methodology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 181.
53 On the underlying methodological question of an etic or emic transcription of audiotactile music, see V. Capo-
raletti, Esperienze di analisi del jazz, cit., chapter 1.
135
here that the trio’s performance produces plexuses of articulation of beats and accentual and
pulsational phenomena that are typical of the rhythmic-metric stylistic aspects of 1930s jazz,
that obviously cannot be traced back to Bach’s original conception. These formal factors, there-
fore, call for a metric treatment of the transcription that is completely different from the metric
scheme originally adopted by J.S. Bach.
Luckily, in the “intercultural translation” represented by a “rewriting” of the Concerto BWV
1043 in its audiotactile interpretation, one thing is sure, and protects us from the risk of un-
founded opinions: a sort of Rosetta Stone that allows us to compare the two metric conceptions
in all security. This element is the three-bar opening of Interprétation, a citation of the brief
figure that acts as an introductory and conclusive “motto” for Mahogany Hall Stomp in the ver-
sions by Louis Armstrong. I have already briefly mentioned, in section 2.1, the asymmetrical
treatment of this citation (with the elision of one bar) and some of its philological implications;
that which interests us now is understanding how this reference, that acts as a signal, carries
out not only a regulatory function as regards agogics, fixing the piece’s pace, but metric as well,
designating the unit of movement and the metric framework within which the Concerto BWV
1043 is reread. It goes without saying that this latter piece of information is crucial for anyone
attempting a transcription.
The factor that allows us to resolve this problem is the system of metric conventions with
cultural connotations in 1930s jazz, incorporated in Armstrong’s “signature”, that are projected
onto Bach’s text. In a transcription, any member of the jazz community would choose the me-
tric profile used by Randy Sandke and David Baker, as shown in Ex. 7, below, to transcribe the
introduction to Armstrong’s Mahogany Hall Stomp.
Example 7. Introduction of Mahogany Hall Stomp (Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five,
1929) (Transcription by R. Sandke and D. Baker)54
It is with the metric and rhythmic conception (and the inflection of the pulsations of the sub-
divided beat) encrypted in Armstrong’s piece, that the jazz trio rereads the work by Bach, in the
54 Louis Armstrong, Mahogany Hall Stomp, 1929, cit. Randy Sandke & David N. Baker, ‘Mahogany Hall Stomp’
as recorded by Louis Armstrong and his Savoy Ballroom Five, 1929 (Transcription in full score) (New York /
Washington: Jazz at Lincoln Center and Smithsonian Institution, 2000).
136
framework of an interprétation swing. The metric conception of the trio’s recordings is thus re-
organised, passing from 2/2, as in Bach, to 4/4, with the crotchet as the basic unit of movement
(in such as way as to generate the metric level in which the L/S articulation of the two putative
quavers is put into effect). For this reason, above and beyond the insertion of the introductory
measures, the bars numbers in Bach’s text do not correspond to those of the retrospective scores
found in the present edition of Interprétation and Improvisation. The most important thing, in
any case, is that in articulating the 4/4 bars Reinhardt uses an accentuation of the even beats,
with the idiomatic articulation that in the blues and jazz tradition (and later in rock, and the
entire audiotactile lineage) was referred to in jargon as a backbeat.55
It is interesting to note that this same metric modification can also been seen, in the ear-
liest days of the jazz tradition, in the passage from ragtime’s 2/2 metre to the 4/4 of Jelly Roll
Morton’s “jazzy” articulation56 that the New Orleans pianist illustrated in abundant detail in
the Library of Congress recordings (1938), made not long after those by the South/Grappelli/
Reinhardt trio. In that case as well, what is at stake is the transformation of a piece coming from
visual culture (the Quadrille) into an audiotactile text.
These observations, incidentally, provide me the occasion to suggest a general hypothesis,
that as far as I know has never been put forward, as to the causes that defined the Long/Short
formula itself in articulating the beat (the famous “swing articulation”) within the language of
jazz. It is in fact possible that this formula had a functional origin, tied to no other than the
indication of metre. Indeed, the Long member of the putative couple of quavers, as a perceptive
effect linked to its longer duration, takes on a more relevant dynamic level that the other, thus
marking the reference level of pulsation, the one onto which the phenomenon of swing eighths
is grafted. In this sense, swing eighths are the cause, rather than the effect, of the way the metre
is structured, pointing towards the reference metric unit that they subdivide (not by chance
referred to as “swing eighths” and not “swing quarters”, suggesting that the metric unit conven-
tionally referred to is the quarter). This phenomenon is quite evident in the performances we
are currently analysing, and is illuminating as to the change from 2/2 in Bach to 4/4 with the
jazz trio. Reinhardt’s rhythms are catalysed, as a consequence, with a “metric attraction”57 on the
articulation of the quarter notes.
In both Interprétation and Improvisation all three musicians alternate passages whose mi-
cro-rhythmic level involves a mathematical-rational subdivision of the beat, and others with a
Long/Short subdivision. It should be noted that in Interprétation, almost until the end of the
first exposition of the formal structure (until bar 54), Reinhardt avoids subdividing the unit of
pulsation (the quarter note) and keeps to the four canonic beats, with sporadic traces of quavers
on the upbeat. Precisely at bar 55, the way Reinhardt handles the metric dissonance caused by
dislocation is remarkable;58 Bach creates this dislocation by way of an eminently attractive-
melodic criterion (the cell with a double adjacent approach, in a fourth progression, dislocated
by Bach by a quaver with respect to the basic metre,59 as highlighted with an ad hoc beaming in
the transcription). Reinhardt amplifies this (Interprétation, bb. 55-60) with the articulation of a
rhythmic formula in which he introduces for the first time the subdivision of the beat, in which
55 I have interpreted this phenomenon as a metric dissonance due to displacement that is overlapped on the
normative frame of the harmonic rhythm. See V. Caporaletti, “La fenomenologia del ritmo nella musica au-
diotattile: il tempo doppio”, «Ring Shout–Rivista di Studi Musicali Afroamericani» (vol. 1, 2002): 77-112.
56 See V. Caporaletti, Jelly Roll Morton, the “Old Quadrille”, cit.
57 See V. Caporaletti, “La fenomenologia del ritmo”, cit.
58 See Harald Krebs, “Some Extensions of the Concepts of Metrical Consonance and Dissonance”, «Journal of
Music Theory», 31 (1987): 103-104; Id., Fantasy Pieces: Metrical Dissonance in the Music of Robert Schumann
(New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Peter Kaminsky, Aspects of Harmony, Rhythm and Form in
Schumann’s Papillons, Carnaval and Davidsbündlertänze (University of Rochester: Ph. D. Diss., 1989).
59 Grappelli, in Interprétation, b. 50, sixth quaver, plays A4 instead of E5; at b. 50, fourth quaver, he plays F5 sharp
instead of natural, as does South at bb. 59 and 109.
137
the idiomatic Long/Short articulation emerges, bringing out the prevailing metric stratification
in such a way as to emphasise the diffraction. In this passage South aligns himself groovemically
to Reinhardt’s rhythmic cadence, adopting the same convention in his rhythmic pronunciation
(Long/Short) of the parts into which the beat is subdivided.
In the same passage (Interprétation, bb. 105-110, see Ex. 8) South engages in a different pro-
cess, by maintaining the literal mathematical-rational subdivision of the beat; the unresolved
conflict generates something we could define “groovemic polyphony”, with interesting effects.
Example 8. Interprétation, bb. 105-110. Groovemic polyphony
To set out an objective reading of this “groovemic polyphony”, we must go deeper into the
micro-structural level, dwelling in particular on bar 107. Table 5 contains a diagram showing
how the eighth notes are handled in terms of duration, as played by Reinhardt (blue rhombu-
ses) and South (red squares). The yellow line corresponds to the ideal mechanical-metronomic
handling, at 214 to the quarter note, with quavers whose duration is mathematically identical;
the dotted lines indicate the way in which the two musicians project the focal points of the
metric grid.
Table 5. Interprétation. Diagram of the duration of the eighth notes in bar 107, played by Reinhardt
and South. The yellow line corresponds to the theoretical metronome articulation (quarter note =
214), with the duration of the eighth notes being mathematically and mechanically identical. The
dotted line indicates the projection of the structural points of the metric grid, misaligned by the two
musicians. L/S identifies the idiomatic Long /Short formula in which the beat is subdivided
Notice that the duration of the quavers played by South are distributed almost horizontally
in the diagram, i.e. they are closely aligned (or, to all extents and purposes, coincide) to the
138
imaginary line of pulsation (in yellow) as articulated by the metronome (in which, obviously,
all of the quavers have the same length, indicated on the vertical axis: in jazz jargon, this is the
so-called straight eighths articulation). It is equally clear that Reinhardt’s idiomatic subdivision
of the beat into two members of non-equivalent duration, with the Long/Short (L/S) formula
(known as swing eighths), produces oblique segments. Lastly, one should note the different pro-
jection onto the focal points of the metric grid by the two musicians (as is shown by the dotted
lines, and the misalignment of the following focal points) that is slightly dislocated, as a per-
ceptive consequence of the different metric-rhythmic projection established by the “groovemic
polyphony”, as well as a tangible confirmation of the participatory discrepancies theorised by
Charles Keil.60
2.3. Harmonic structuration

As regards harmony, one preliminary observation should be made as to the audiotactile co-
gnitive schemes that appear with Reinhardt. These schemes completely disregard the syntactic
and logical-combinatorial peculiarities of the abstract sound processes formalised by the symbo-
lic system of notation, being integrated on the contrary in a manual codification of chordal
formations and shaped by eminently phonic-acoustic criteria. The chords are connected to one
another solely on the basis of the activation of phonic agglomerations, and are as such subject to
contextual negotiation; the way in which the harmonies unfold is not founded on an abstractive
and combinatorial syntactic logic, through a normative systematics consisting in regulations and
prohibitions based on exosomatic, objective and mathematically determined codes, as in the
practice of tonal writing. The system of audiotactile regulation in Reinhardt is culturally defined
on the basis of anthropological criteria, in the sense of an adherence to stylistic traits that are
regulated by conventions shared by a community (the limitations priorly established by the jazz
community, that are analogous to the dynamics of traditional cultures).61
Example 9, below, provides an exemplification of the ways in which Reinhardt categorises
Bach’s thorough bass on the basis of his aural apperception of the recording of the Concerto.
The decoding is realised in chordal terms, with all the problems foreseeable in transposing a
contrapuntal texture into a purely harmonic one. We have already noted that the values that
interest Reinhardt involve phonic colour and sensorimotor factors, dispelling the conception of
music as an exercitium arithmeticae occultum62 and moving away from its constructive and ratio-
nalised configuration, i.e. the mathematisation of music caused by its projection onto a semio-
graphic system based on the Cartesian coordinates of pitch and duration, towards an originary
phenomenological presence, an object that is impregnated by its vital relationship with an active
subject.
60 Charles Keil, “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music”, «Cultural Anthropology» (3, 1987): 275-
284. Cfr. anche Jan A. Prögler, “Searching for Swing. Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm Sec-
tion”«Ethnomusicology» (39, 1, 1995): 21-55.
61 Roman Jakobson and Piotr Bogatyrëv, “Die Folklore als eine besondere Form des Schaffens”, in Donum Na-
talicium Schrijnen (Utrecht: Nijmegen, 1929), 900-913.
62 A «hidden arithmetic exercise», Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, from a letter to the mathematician Christian
Goldbach dated 17 April 1712, in A. P. Juschkewitsch and Ju. Kopelewitsch (eds.), La correspondance de Leibniz
avec Goldbach «Studia Leibnitiana», xx, 1988, 182. This definition emblematically renders the visual matrix that
dominates the modern development of written Western music.
139
Example 9. Reinhardt’s cognitive decoding in chordal-harmonic terms of the A and B Sections of the
thorough bass of the Concerto BWV 1043. The Model thus categorised was deduced by Reinhardt via
an aural apperception of the recording. (The metre of Bach’s original notation has been reformulated,
to allow for an intercultural comparison).
As regards Reinhardt’s pragmatic recoding of the thorough bass, one obvious limitation must
be noted: the third entry of the fugal subject (b. 22 of Interprétation) is not included in either of
the two recordings. And yet, a fugal structure is simulated in the texture of this passage, by em-
phasising the individuality given to the bass line (thus passing from an eminently visual factor,
both linear and combinatorial, such as the subject of a fugue, to a material or textural dimension
that represents a tactile factor par excellence): here, Reinhardt inserts a descending movement in
the bass, that takes on structural significance (see Ex. 10).
Example 10. Interprétation, Reinhardt, bb. 22-26. The bass line takes on a linear individuality, simula-
ting the change in texture created by the entry of the fugal Subject in the bass
From the point of view of performance coherence, in Interprétation Reinhardt remains clo-
ser to the Model, which lets one suppose that he was more lucid and had a greater mnemonic
efficiency with respect to the second recording. In this latter instance, indeed, we come across
various cases in which Reinhardt contextually negotiates metric and harmonic factors, resolving
ex tempore a few uncertainties. He loses sight of the harmonic Model at b. 17 in Improvisation
(where he forgets the half-diminished B min7/b5, 2nd degree of A minor, and plays G major,
with a last-minute insertion of an E min7/b5 in 1st inversion, that suggests a cadence in D mi-
nor, instead of, as is correctly required by the Model, in A minor), and at bb. 32-33 once again in
Improvisation (where he seems to lose his metric bearings with respect to the harmonic model,
deviating by a quarter note, until he gets back, with lightening reflexes, in b. 35, to the regular A
min7/b5, which re-inserts him in the correct harmonic/metric process) (see Ex. 11).
140
Example 11. Improvisation, bb. 32-35. Reinhardt drifts away from the metric/harmonic line, unlike
his regular conduct in the corresponding passage of Interprétation (see the upper pentagram), and
dislocates the harmonic rhythm, which is realigned in b. 35
In any case, one must admit that the real-time compensatory strategies adopted by Reinhardt,
in which a significant emphasis is placed on the the staccato articulation that shifts the guitar’s
rhythmic function towards a percussive, rather than a harmonic, effect, are symptomatic of his
ability to resolve in itinere any loss of control of his extemporised musical conduct. In reality,
these uncertainties are not perceived as such, and this no doubt represents one of the most pe-
culiar and extraordinary characteristics of audiotactile music, especially in jazz improvisation,
bearing witness as it does to an ethos based on dialogue and communitarian values.63
On this matter, it is important to note a phenomenon inherent in the aesthetics of audio-
tactile music, namely the greater dependency on formal control during extemporisation than
during improvisation, in that the higher degree of creative freedom in the latter positively in-
terferes with any appearance of a compromised formal-processual integrity. This morphological
dyscrasia is most apparent when, as is the case in extemporary processes, priority goes to the
morphological constraint of a model to be respected, that is, a set of formal directions – less
binding, however, than a score – to be implemented. We now propose (Ex. 12), as a key to com-
parison, a paradigmatic outlay of Reinhardt’s two harmonisations above Bach’s original (whose
metre has been converted to 4/4, for an easier comparative reading).
63 Compare the same ability to conceal the loss of control of an extemporisation, displayed by the Charles Min-
gus Quintet and documented in my transcription of Serenade in Blue, in V. Caporaletti, I processi improvvisati-
vi, cit., 163 ff.
141
142
Example 12. The A and B sections (models) are now extemporised by Reinhardt, in their concre-
te rhythmic-harmonic unfolding, in both Interprétation and Improvisation. In this paradigmatic
framework we can observe the two versions and compare them with Bach’s original (the figured bass
has been numbered by W. Rust, in the Breitkopf & Härtel edition). Inside the rectangles, the A (with
its transformations to the dominant [Ax] and the subdominant [Ay]) and B Models are shown. (P
indicates a connecting dominant pedal)
143
2.4. Melodic/phraseological aspects

On the melodic and rhythmic-intervallic level, or the “axis of succession”, especially for Rein-
hardt the audiotactile cognitive schemes set in motion similarly do not exclusively depend on a
formalisation of scalar/chordal models, but can be defined following the traces inscribed in the
interaction between a logic pertaining to the fingers and the schematisation of patterns realised
on the fingerboard of the instrument.
As regards phraseology, in the melodic developments improvised by the violinists a notable
rhythmic and expressive richness can be seen, even though this freedom is contained within
limits that are not particularly adventurous. For example, procedures involving treatments of
pitch that are foreign to the normative system employed, such as blues inflections, are fairly
rare (one case, however, arises with the diminished fifth with microtonal inflexion at b. 109 of
Interprétation), perhaps out of reverence towards the classical tradition.
Analysing the two violinists’ efficacious phraseology, a consolidated analytical model would
reveal a formulaic type of formativity,64 with the use of patterns that can be traced to each of
their personal idiosyncratic styles. We can see, for example, in Stéphane Grappelli, idiomatic
formative traits (all taken from Improvisation). First of all, a monotonic cell that is “anchored
to the beat” (and is derived from the early style of Louis Armstrong) in b. 99 (see Ex. 13; this
pattern is also found in bb. 58, 105, 114, 167, 171, 174 and, with variations, in bb. 157, 162).
Example 13. Improvisation, b. 99, Grappelli. Monotonic cell “anchored to the beat” (Armstrong style)
Or again, a typical arpeggio formula, found in b. 87 (see Ex. 14) and also in b. 127.
Example 14. Improvisation, b. 87, Grappelli. Arpeggio
Again, in bars 62, 94, 125-26 and 178 (see Ex. 15) we find one of Grappelli’s most typical
stylistic indicators, that Matt Glaser65 has defined as a “hysterical vibrato”. This is in fact a hys-
terical, visceral and extremely expressive high note, metrically placed at the end of the phrase, or
sometimes at the beginning, acting as an anacrusis, characteristic of Grappelli’s sensibility (but
stylistically derived from Gospel and African-American music in general). This stylistic trait is
also present at the beginning of the repetition of the exposition played by Grappelli in Inter-
prétation. Curiously, the example given by Glaser, with no reference to Improvisation, is on the
64 Among the pioneers of this analytic approach, see Thomas Owens, Charlie Parker: Techniques of Improvisation
(University of California: Ph. D. Diss., 1974); Barry D. Kernfeld, Adderley, Coltrane and Davis at the Twilight
of Bebop: The Search for Melodic Coherence (1958-59) (Cornell University: Ph. D. Diss., 1981); Gregory Smith,
Homer, Gregory and Bill Evans? The Theory of Formulaic Composition in the Context of Jazz Piano improvisation
(Harvard University: Ph. D. Diss.: 1983). For a recent refocusing of formular analysis as opposed to thematic
improvisation, see Benjamin Givan, “Gunther Schuller and the Challenge of Sonny Rollins: Stylistic Context,
Intentionality, and Jazz Analysis” «Journal of American Musicological Society» (67, 1, 2014): 167-237.
65 Matt Glaser and Stéphane Grappelli, Jazz Violin (New York-London: Oak Publications, 1981), 53.
144
note D5,66 as are most of its occurrences in Improvisation: it would almost seem that the phonic
identity of this expressive gesture involves a defined pitch, falling outside of musical grammar
itself to become a bodily habitus.
Example 15. Improvisation, Grappelli, “hysterical vibrato”: a) b. 62, b) bb. 125-26, c) b. 178
One must also mention Grappelli’s inclination towards chromatic passages, as in bars 159-
166, analysed below (see Ex. 18).
In a similar fashion, for Eddie South, alongside the double stops he exhibits in the Finale,
one must take into consideration as an idiomatic characteristic the repeated notes that appear
at b. 78 and following (see Ex. 16), as well as in bars 119, 143 ff. and 150. This is a procedure
that Glaser has also defined as connoting South’s style («the hallmarks of which include […
the] insistent repetition of a particular pitch, with myriad changes in the rhythm and approach
tones»).67
Example 16. Improvisation, South, repeated notes in staccato, bb. 78-81
Thus far we have only looked at information that can be gleaned from the syntactic chain,
and can be translated and documented in terms of notation. On this matter, as regards the
analysis of the melodic level as well, the Audiotactile Theory provides us with new possibilities
for theory and enquiry, concerning the categorisation of the notions of formula and pattern, that
are crucial concepts for jazz pedagogy and didactics as well. We saw in sections 1.2.1. and 1.2.2
that processes of NAE in particular reformulate the phenomenology of audiotactile music with
respect to musical expressions of traditional oral cultures, grafting onto jazz, aesthetically spe-
aking, the “learned” values of modern Western aesthetics: the principles of creative originality,
mobility of aesthetic norms, conscious projection of artistic authorship, aesthetic autonomy of
the work, and non-functional reception. Now, in this framework, the notion of the formula, as
a conceptual instrument,68 is jarringly inadequate, carrying with it as it does the heritage of oral
culture, that is entirely inappropriate to the audiotactile phenomenology of jazz. Actually, the
66 Glaser provides an example from a version of Oh, Lady Be Good in G major, ibid.
67 M. Glaser and S. Grappelli, Jazz Violin, cit., 85.
68 One must recall that the notion of the “formula” as a methodological instrument originated in the context of
studies pertaining to the oral transmission of the Gospels and later to Slavonic epics (see Marcel Jousse, Le style
oral rythmique et mnémotechnique chez les Verbo-moteurs (Paris: Beauchesne, 1925); Milman Parry, The Making
of Homeric Verse, in Adam Parry (ed.), The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971);
Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), in a milieu that is therefore
completely different from the one connoted by late modern Western aesthetics, as is the case with jazz.
145
so-called patterns of the preceding examples cannot be ipso facto traced back to similar oral for-
mative structures, in that the cognitive dimension of NAE causes them, as hypercodified strings,
to be characterised by a subjective artistic idiolect. Obviously, one must bear in mind here the
distinction between an artistic idiolect, a corpus-idiolect and a current-idiolect, and the system
of relations between subjectivity and stylistic and cultural traits in which individual formativity
is always historically and dynamically implied.69
That which is at stake is the aesthetic nature of these hypercodified strings, that now become
a material sign of authorship, as opposed to the impersonal and interchangeable formula that is
generally marked by the oralistic ideology of anonymous and collective creation, subject to the
paradigmatic logic of equivalent classes of modules and sub-modules, as defined by countless
ethnomusicologists (from Brăiloiu to Arom).70 This latter type of logic clearly represents a ne-
gative value when seen through the eyes of Western aesthetics, which is based on the axiological
criteria of originality and aesthetic autonomy mentioned above, and that coherently caused the
disapproval of Heinrich Schenker, who condemned the practice of «inventing something in
advance in isolation and out of context, only to insert it into a strained patchwork later on».71
Obviously, the audiotactile nature of these strings distances them as much from oral practices
as it does from the subjectivity at work in creating the visually based culture underlying written
composition, and thus generates other classes of values. From a concrete analytical point of
view, the relevant factors of these strings involve, much more than the syntactic values of the
syntagmatic chain defined by the semiographic process, the autographic and processual values
promoted by the ATP in its sonorous phenomenology, such as swing, the energy of the vectorial
trajectory in the pulsational context, the phono-material articulation and much more.
Above and beyond the use of hypercodified strings, however, we can also observe a few cases
of motivic elaboration and internal coherence based on hypotactic constructions: Schenkerian
analysis is appropriate in describing these latter traits, even though their sense, and above all the
implied model of construction, has a completely different nature with respect to the dynamics
of written composition. Examples 17 and 18 offer a comparison between the A Section of the
Concerto (the initial phrase, metrically reformulated in 4/4) and Grappelli’s phrasing at bb. 159-
166. (In passing, this phrase, played by Grappelli, is highly important and will be at the centre of
our discussion in section 2.5, concerning the causes of the erroneous addition of section IV/A3).
As regards structural coherence, on the other hand, note the correlation with Bach’s Urlinie,
that covers an octave: a circumstance that goes well beyond the simplistic observation according
to which one can “project”, a posteriori, any melodic outline onto a chromatic descending line.
One can easily remark that the relevance intentionally conferred to the structural centres of this
phrase identifies an elaborative logic that gives due consideration to the constructive aspects of
the Model, even without appealing to the “cumulative” logic of after-the-fact creation, as is the
case with written composition. In this example, the Model’s prolongation through techniques
of diminution is quite evident, techniques that Schenker72 conceived as the basic criterion for
69 For the notion of hyper-codification, see Umberto Eco, Trattato di semiotica generale (Milano: Bompiani,
1975), 188; for the artistic idiolect, the corpus-idiolect and the current-idiolect, ibid., 338 ff. For the notion of
formativity see Luigi Pareyson, Estetica. Teoria della formatività (Milano: Bompiani, 1988 [1954]).
70 See Constantin Brăiloiu, “Reflexions sur la creation musicale collective”, found in «Diogène» (25, janvier-mars
1959): 83-93; Id., Le giusto syllabique, «Anuario del Instituto Español de Musicologia» (7, 1954): 117-158;
S. Arom, African Polyphony & Polyrhythm, cit., 137 ff. As regards the critiques of this collectivist approach
towards the problem of creativity and the perspectives of attributing authorship in oral cultural traditions, as
found e.g. in Jean-Jacques Nattiez (ed.), Musiche e culture, vol. III, in Enciclopedia della musica (Torino: Einaudi,
2003), xx ff., I believe that this interesting problem should be re-examined in the light, however, of the pro-
cesses of neo-auratic encoding that emerged in the 20th century.
71 Heinrich Schenker, “Ein Beitrag zur Ornamentik“ (Eng. trans. H. Siegel, “A Contribution to the Study of
Ornamentation” «The Music Forum» (4, 1976): 27.
72 Heinrich Schenker, “The Art of Improvisation” in William Drabkin (ed.) The Masterwork in Music: A Yearbook
146
improvisational activity (and, not by chance, given his theoretical premises, of compositional
activity).
Example 17. Analysis of Section A the Concerto BWV 1043
Example 18. Improvisation, bb. 159-166. Analysis of Grappelli’s phrasing of the Model shown in the
previous example (Section A)
2.5. Interactional phenomenology of improvisation

As we saw in section 1.2.1, the foundations of the audiotactile principle lie in the existential
nature of the undivided whole defined as a «subject-object-relation»: in this sense, interactional
phenomenological analysis places the subject (the musician) at the centre, as an integral part of
the relation with the object (real-time musical creation) and other subjects.
Interactional dynamics – understood here in the sense of Karl Jaspers’ phenomenological
analysis and Erving Goffman’s ethnomethodology –73 in the performative practice of audio-
tactile music, and to the utmost degree in jazz, are significant in the same way as the dynamics
pertaining to musical form, considered above all in its energetic development, as co-carriers
of sociocultural and anthropological factors; in reality, the former are not separate from the
latter in their essence. The most authoritative methods of analysis, unfortunately, reveal little
or nothing about these aspects, as they freeze the melodic-harmonic structure and objectify it
according to models provided by the reifying criteria of visually oriented music theory.74 Only
a hermeneutics carried out with participative intuition can reach these profound psychological
dynamics, that on account of their purely existential nature, their unconscious causes, their
corporeal habitus and the intuition of becoming, fully establish themselves within the formal
negotiations of audiotactile music, and above all jazz, providing a more significant and a deeper
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994-97); vol. I (1994), 9-40.

73 See K. Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (Berlin-Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1973); Erving Goffman, In-
teraction Ritual. Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (Garden City: Doubleday, 1967); Id., Strategic Interaction
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969).
74 For an adequate treatment of these issues, see V. Caporaletti, Swing e groove, cit.
147
image of it than the purely musical substrate made up of the interactions between musicians,
contexts and listeners. It is worth while to recall, in passing, that jazz culture has always been
aware of these psycho-dynamic transactions – that cannot entirely be comprehended through
the notion of interplay –75 and has named them with various terms referring to the semantic
fields of empathy and intuition, among which “feeling”. For this kind of interaction a descriptive
analytical approach, both phenomenological and hermeneutic, is necessary.
Improvisation, CHORUS I (bb. 63-94) [1.07–1.39]
This chorus is highly important, because it fixes the AABB structure of the improvised part,
after the exposition of the obbligato “theme” (Tutti/Solo). The structure of the violin solos is
organised by the jazz code of phraseological alternation, following a responsorial model, regula-
ted here by groups of eight bars (chase 8) which correspond to the A and B sections (see above,
section 2.1). The phraseological consistency of Bach’s solos is thus re-proposed, with a curious
overlap between the two systems of conventions. At bar 63 [1.07] there is some indecision as to
who shall be the first to “take the floor”, in that Grappelli with his idiomatic incipit consisting in
an anacrusic suspension on the tonic in the upper octave (a sforzato D5 with marked vibrato: as
we have seen, the hysterical vibrato, in Matt Glaser’s definition) tentatively begins the A section.
This signal of incitement is immediately taken up by South, with an interlocking proposal –
producing a sort of involuntary hochetus – thus establishing the alternation of solo interventions
with a length of eight bars, according to the aforementioned jazz convention of interlocutory
pattern of the improvised exchanges. Grappelli’s incipit would seem to be a conditioned re-
sponse, in that he had entered in the same way at the same point of the second exposition of
Interprétation (ms. 62 [1.15]). In any case, this indetermination as to who should give the cue to
the improvisational exchanges can be explained by the sudden and no doubt bewildering action
carried out by Delaunay, who erupted within the performative arena and removed the scores
from the music stands in order to induce, contrarily to the previous recording of Interprétation,
improvised creation. One must note, in any event, that as regards the adherence to the melo-
dic linearity established by Bach there is an adjustment that essentially carries on until bar 48
[0.52], at which point one begins to notice a progressive departure from the details of the score,
as the violinists begin to introduce new material. Hence, to establish with certainty the moment
in which Delaunay removed the scores, one must decide whether to use an interpretative crite-
rion that is etic (which would indicate b. 48) or emic (b. 63); the latter option, in any case, would
correspond more closely to the account given by Delaunay, according to which the scores were
removed «at the end of the chorus».
Improvisation, CHORUS II (bb. 95-118) [1.40–2.04]
This chorus is incomplete with respect to the AABB formal macro-structure, the second B
section (II/B2) having been omitted. Various hypotheses can be put forward as to the reasons
for the lacking phrase. On the one hand, some indecision had been shown earlier by Grappelli,
who does not resolutely begin the phrase at II/B1 (there is a pause between measures 110 and
111 [1.57] – in which, one might mention, Reinhardt intervenes with lightening speed, rol-
ling with triplets and emphatically marking the beginning of the new section – that certainly
could be interpreted as an intentional interruption of the melodic flow, intended to rarefy the
phraseological rhythm, even though the concise and rapid character of the solo interventions
does not seem to support this hypothesis). Now, this kind of performative indetermination, in
the interactive factuality of improvised creation, is never free of consequences. When South
steadfastly begins the following section (b. 119 [2.05]), with an imperious repetition of A5, as
though to set the course and firmly grasp the helm of a ship perceived to be in some difficulty,
75 See Ingrid Monson, Saying Something (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
148
with an injection of energy and a tangible directive intentionality, we see Reinhardt – as though
recognising in South’s voluntary projection a sort of dominant psychological trait, a resolutely
foundational action or a modification of the piece’s direction – take up the harmonic structure
of the A section, exposing the formal scheme da capo and consequently “cutting” one section
from the chorus. This perceptive propulsion, already collective, also involves Grappelli, who at
the same moment proposes the beginning of the A section.
This entire situation could be given an alternative or concomitant interpretation, as a case of
formal illusionism, which is not infrequent in improvisational practices based on strophic forms.
In this case, the II/B1 section might have been understood by Django as the bridge of a conven-
tional AABA form (of which it is the third member), instead of the third member of an AABB
formal structure, according to which the improvisation had been taking shape. In the following
Chorus III, however, the AABB structure is unequivocally clarified.
Improvisation, CHORUS III (bb. 119-150) [2.05–2.36]
In this stupendous chorus, South intervenes in III/A1 (b. 119 [2.05]) with repeated notes
in a dense and incisive barrage, characterised by its spasmodic adherence to the pulsational
continuity and its terse and compressed vibrato. The phrasing, in its syntactically elementary
nature, is crystal clear, charged with the psychomotor energy of swing that emanates from its
specific phonic characteristics, its particular tuning and attack (South’s attack transient could
be defined as “revulsive”, tending as it does towards “tearing off ” the string with the bow). The
conclusion of the phrase, with an intense blues-inspired portamento, provokes excited enthusia-
sm and rapture in Grappelli, who reacts with musical exclamations of ecstasy and expressions of
emotional reinforcement (among which the extremely high D that is “shouted” at bars 125-126
[2.12]: the “hysterical vibrato”); with an equal amount of energy, he responds with blues inflec-
tions, set within chromatic passages. As though he was being deferential, or thankful towards
the great American violinist, in III/B1 Grappelli rolls out a “red carpet” for him (bb. 135-142
[2.21–2.28]) with a devout harmonisation in bichords that projects South’s expressive intensity
even higher, as the latter remains close to Bach’s melody and leaves to the kairos, consisting in
a deliberate intersection of existential routes in a unanimity of intentions or a coalescence of
creative ideas, the task of becoming a vehicle of musical sense, rising up in a concertato that tran-
scends the dimension of improvisation itself.
Improvisation, CHORUS IV (bb. 151-190) [2.37–3.20]
Grappelli however seems to pay some consequences for this profound impression caused by
South’s expressive power in the following chorus, the 4th, in which both he and Reinhardt, after
the creative climax, literally “lose their bearings”. The bewilderment caused perhaps by the awa-
reness of not being able to sustain the level of expressive intensity previously attained, or more
simply a drop in energy and concentration, causes them to lose their sense of formal orientation,
leading to no less than an erroneous addition of the A section (IV/A3, bb. 167-174 [2.54-3.01]).
The Chorus opens with some important implicit interactive signals: just as South had ex-
panded, in III/B1 and III/B2, the amount of space for solo intervention, bringing it from eight
bars to sixteen, Grappelli now prepares to adapt, immediately attuning himself to these wider
expressive possibilities. And, once again in a symmetric fashion, just as Grappelli had sustained
South with a harmonisation in bichords during III/B1, now South returns the favour, using
however, rather than a harmonic texture, a number of brief contrapuntal interventions that
intersect with Grappelli’s improvised melody making (IV/A1, bb. 151-158 [2.37-2.44]). The
latter then continues individually in the following section (IV/A2, bb. 159-166 [2.45-2.53]),
completing his sixteen-bar solo excursion. The formal disequilibrium referred to above occurs
after this section.
149
Among the intrinsically musical causes of this moment of uncertainty, one might imagine
Grappelli’s interesting chromatic phrasing in IV/A2, that we analysed above (see Ex. 18). Here,
as though to emulate South or rise to the occasion, Grappelli chooses not to follow the phonic
values of expressive intensity that had predominantly been brought into play by South, but an
alternative syntactic route consisting in descending chromatic progressions (bb. 159-166). He
thus distances himself from the familiar and almost extemporised formulas of the preceding
phrases, exploring new material, with the real risk of a poorly projection of the metric and
harmonic orientation, and even surprising the highly expert Reinhardt. Incidentally, Grappelli
seems to surprise himself as well, because the repetition of the A3 section also contravenes the
implicit transitory agreement as to a prolongation of the period of solo intervention (as we
have seen, previously defined as not eight but sixteen measures), in spite of South’s timid and
unfruitful tentative in taking up the exchanges under this new arrangement (across bb. 167-168
[2.55]).
In the following A section (IV/A3) (bb. 167-174 [2.54-3.01]), therefore, apparently aware
of the dead end in which he has wound up, Grappelli plays erratic phrasing, wandering in vain
between scales and arpeggios as he searches for an idea or a direction, thus giving the idea of
folding back onto himself or playing for time, with the clear intention of finding a solution with
respect to the dangerous situation that is taking shape (note the inconclusive repetition of the
Armstrong-style monotonic cell – which, moreover, is itself rhythmically constructed by a re-
petition of the same note, essentially on the downbeat – at bb. 167, 171, 174). This indeterminacy,
or better yet the feeling of some uncertainty or hesitation, was sensed by the then twenty-five
year old Hugues Panassié in his review of the recording (without however a full awareness of
the formal dynamics that it implied).76
In any case, once again regarding the reasons behind the formal imbalance that came about,
one must also consider a further hypothesis, tied to the extra-musical factors involved in a
contextual negotiation of form in audiotactile music. The recording of the performance, in the
technical-mechanical sense of the term, at the end of the 4th chorus, was drawing close to its
inevitable time limit – bearing in mind that these limits were mandatory, dictated in 1937 by
pre-magnetic forms of phonographic technology – and surely at about this moment some si-
gnals (in these cases, perhaps quite agitated) must have been exchanged, acting as a prelude to
the need for an imminent conclusion. These signals may well have contributed to causing some
confusion and de-concentration, in view of the forced conclusion of the performance. Indeed,
immediately after South resolutely introduces section IV/B1 (b. 175 [3.02]), once again brin-
ging the situation back under control, followed by the robust intervention, with unisons and
fourths on the last re-proposal of the B section by Grappelli (IV/B2, bb. 183-190 [3.10-3.20])
with a clear intention to provide a signal and mark the peremptory and affirmative finale, brin-
ging the ship safely home with the final cadence, with a rising cigány-style chromatic line.
(Translated by Brent Waterhouse)
76 «Un léger flottement vers la fin du disque n’est que passager et ne saurait en rien ternir l’éclat de cet enregis-
trement vraiment extraordinaire», Hugues Panassié, “Review of Eddie South, Stéphane Grappelli and Django
Reinhardt, Interprétation Swing et Improvisation sur le 1er mouvement du Concerto en ré mineur de J-S. Bach – SW
18”, «Jazz Hot», 24 (April/May, 1938): 23.
150
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Phenomenological and Musical Analysis of The Reinhardt-South-Grappelli Recordings of J.S.Bach's Double Violin Concerto (BWV 1043)

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Phenomenological and Musical Analysis of The Reinhardt-South-Grappelli Recordings of J.S.Bach's Double Violin Concerto (BWV 1043)

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Phenomenological and Musical Analysis of the Reinhardt-South-Grappelli

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PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND MUSICAL ANALYSIS

1.1. Socio-Anthropological/Aesthetic Aspects

1.2. Some basic Concepts of the Theory of Audiotactile Formativity

1.2.1. The Audiotactile Principle (ATP)

1.2.2. Neo-Auratic Encoding (NAE)

1.2.3. Extemporisation vs. Improvisation

1.3. Interprétation Swing and Improvisation: Phenomenology of the Practices

from neo-auratic processes, through a psychophysical audiotactile implementation on the instrument.

ulation, see V. Caporaletti, Swing e Groove, cit., 240 ff.

Example 4. The four measures of the previous example, subjected to improvisation

2. Technical and Musical Aspects

2.1. Large-Scale Formal Structures

a) The Concerto BWV 1043

b) Large-scale formal structure in Interprétation and Improvisation

Table 2. Formal layout of Interprétation

46 See below, section 2.2 for further details on this matter.

2.2. Metric/Rhythmic and Micro-Rhythmic Criteria

Example 8. Interprétation, bb. 105-110. Groovemic polyphony

2.3. Harmonic structuration

2.4. Melodic/phraseological aspects

Example 14. Improvisation, b. 87, Grappelli. Arpeggio

Example 16. Improvisation, South, repeated notes in staccato, bb. 78-81

Example 17. Analysis of Section A the Concerto BWV 1043

2.5. Interactional phenomenology of improvisation

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994-97); vol. I (1994), 9-40.

(Translated by Brent Waterhouse)

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