An Imaginary Musical Road Movie : Transmedial Semiotic Structures in Brad Mehldau's Concept Album "Highway Rider" Arvidson, Mats 2016 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Arvidson, M. (2016). An Imaginary Musical Road Movie : Transmedial Semiotic Structures in Brad Mehldau's Concept Album "Highway Rider". (Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences; Vol. 10). Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences. 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LUND UNIVERSITY PO Box 117 221 00 Lund +46 46-222 00 00 An Imaginary Musical Road Movie An Imaginary Musical Road Movie revolves around two integrated objects: on the one hand, the programmatic and cyclic concept album Highway Rider (2010), which is jazz pianist and composer Brad Mehldau’s most complex instrumental work, and on the other hand transmediality, both as a concept and phenomenon. Musicologist Mats Arvidson claims that a deep understanding of an intermedial music culture is a prerequisite for knowing how to interpret a work like Highway Rider. Having such an intermedial framework at hand further enables the integration of formal and structural analysis with cultural, historical and technological aspects of music. In a captivating manner, Arvidson shows how Highway Rider circulates in and through different cultural systems, and in doing so, explains how, where and when musical meaning is produced. Highway Rider is understood as a transmedial phenomenon both through its genre-specificity and its ARVIDSON MATS narrative structure, that is, as an imaginary musical road movie whose story raises questions about the meaning of life. The study is addressed to musicologists interested in issues related to intermediality, as well as to researchers within the Mats Arvidson field of cultural studies, film studies, media studies, visual studies and comparative literature. An Imaginary The author, Mats Arvidson (born in 1973), studied musicology, philosophy and the history of ideas and sciences at Lund University. He holds a PhD in musicology from University of Musical Road Movie Gothenburg and is Assistant Professor of Intermedial Studies TRANSMEDIAL SEMIOTIC STRUCTURES at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund IN BRAD MEHLDAU’S CONCEPT ALBUM HIGHWAY RIDER University. LUND STUDIES IN ARTS AND CULTURAL SCIENCES ISBN 978-91-981458-5-4 (print) · ISSN 2001-7529 (print) LUND STUDIES IN ARTS AND CULTURAL SCIENCES 10 10 an imaginary musical road movie An Imaginary Musical Road Movie Transmedial Semiotic Structures in Brad Mehldau’s Concept Album Highway Rider mats arvidson Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences 10 Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences is a series of monographs and edited volumes of high scholarly quality in subjects related to the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University. An editorial board decides on issues concerning publication. All texts have been peer reviewed prior to publication. www.kultur.lu.se Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences can be ordered via Lund University: www.ht.lu.se/en/serie/lsacs/ E-mail: [email protected] I would like to thank the Erik Philip-Sörensens stiftelse, Wahlgrenska stiftelsen, Stiftelsen Längmanska kulturfonden and the Division of Intermedial Studies, Lund University for their much needed financial support. Copyright © Mats Arvidson, 2016 isbn 978-91-981458-5-4 Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences 10 Faculties of Humanities and Theology, Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Division of Intermedial Studies issn 2001-7529 (print), 2001-7510 (online) Cover design: Johan Laserna Typesetting: Jens Arvidson Printed in Sweden by Media-Tryck, Lund University, Lund 2016 an imaginary musical road movie: transmedial semiotic structures in brad mehldau’s concept album highway rider The idea of ‘music alone’ as an independent auditory medium expressed in the institu- tions of today’s academia does not resonate with how we listen to and perceive music in everyday life; music is always accompanied with paratexts such as programme notes, LP sleeve images or other types of media. This idea forms the basis for this essay and is used to present a number of issues concerning meaning production: How, where and when is musical meaning produced? To be more specific, this essay deals with how an intermedial music culture can be described and analysed through one specific case study. Intermediality arises in the crossings between constructed media borders, which means that different aspects of a specific medium can be trans- gressed in various ways. Based on the American composer and jazz musician Brad Mehldau’s (1970–) most complex instrumental work, the concept album Highway Rider (2010), this essay explores how such an album can be understood within an intermedial music culture. It merges formal and structural analysis with cultural, his- torical, technological and psychoanalytic aspects of music emphasising the role of subjectivity in the production of meaning. By offering a varied and broad theoretical and methodological framework, the author demonstrates ways to approach the work using concepts like transmediality, intermedial reference, meta-reference, iconicity, semiotics, paratext, psychoanalysis and ecological psychology. Mats Arvidson is Assistant Professor of Intermedial Studies at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University Contents List of Figures xi List of Literary and Musical Examples xi Acknowledgements xv Preface: Culture, Materiality and Subjectivity xvii The Object of Study: Mehldau’s Highway Rider xxii Introduction – The LP Record, the Record Sleeve and the Case of Intermediality 1 Media Convergence, Intermediality and Digital Culture 5 Historical Contingencies and Ritual Narratives: Live and Reproduced Music 8 ‘The Medium is the Message’/‘The Message is in the Medium’: Issues of Form and Content 11 Digital Aesthetics and Communication: On Empirical Matters 12 The Purpose and Outline of the Essay 14 1. Theoretical and Methodological Framework 17 Intermediality and Transmediality 17 Description and Function of Reference 22 vii Narrativity in Music 27 The Function of the Paratext 31 Semiotic Analysis as a Formal Approach to Music and Some Notes on Musical Meaning 34 Music and Multimodal Metaphor 41 Concluding Remarks: Techniques of Interpretation 47 2. Genre as Semiotic Code: What Kind of Genre is HigHway RideR? 49 The Emergence of the Song Cycle and the Symphonic Poem: Structure and Content 52 Concept Album: A Historically Contingent Cultural Phenomenon 56 Third Stream: An Exploration of Cultural Pluralism and Personal Freedom 62 Concluding Remarks: Family Resemblance and Genre Identification 63 3. The Poietic and Esthesic World of Brad Mehldau 65 Form, Style and Narrative 66 Music and Language: Democracy, Solidarity and Utopia 75 Concluding Remarks: Intra- and Extracompositional Features of Highway Rider 78 4. Analysis of Two Levels of Materiality 81 First Level of Materiality 81 The Verbal and Visual Peritexts: The Narrative Architecture of the CD 81 The Verbal Epitext: The Narrative Frame of the Music 86 Highway Rider as an Imaginary Musical Road Movie: viii Representing and Mediating Utopian Culture 91 Second Level of Materiality 99 The Material Traces of Highway Rider 99 Two Types of Semiosis and Two Types of Unity 99 The Process of Segmentation and the Coding of Musical Motif and Musical Form 101 The Study of Language about Music: Subjectivity and the Implied Listener 105 The Musical Story of Highway Rider 108 5. Cyclic, Narrative and Psychoanalytic Aspects of HigHway RideR 145 First Part: Unity as a Musical Experience 146 Silent/Salient Units as Unifying Narrative Features: Meaning and Effect 150 Second Part: Psychoanalytic Aspects of the Imaginary Movie 157 The Imaginary Musical Road Movie as an Imaginary Signifier 159 6. A Modern Symphonic Poem: A Signifier without a Signified?­ 171 “Always Departing”/“Always Returning” 174 Meta-Reference and Transmediality 181 7. Towards an Understanding of HigHway RideR: Culture, Materiality and Subjectivity Revisited 193 Whose Listening? An Ecological Approach to Culture, Materiality and Subjectivity 193 Musicology, Intermedial Studies and the Concept of Culture 207 Concluding Remarks: Modalities and Intermedialities of Highway Rider 210 ix Afterword: Is Music Really a Stone? 213 References 219 Appendix I (Information about the CD) 231 Appendix II (The original storybook) 233 Index 235 x List of Figures Figure 1. The front cover of Brad Mehldau’s record sleeve to the CD Highway Rider (2010) 83 Figure 2. The beginning of the storybook 87 Figure 3. The structure of the storybook