PINK FLOYD’S «THE RED VIBURNUM IN THE MEADOW»: A NOVEL IN THE SCORE

Abstract

The paper explores the design and structure of Pink Floyd’s single «Hey Hey Rise Up» in terms of a patterned plot in a work of fiction. The music and video of the single are contextualized in the field of comparative studies and problematized as a feasible intersemiotic approach to musical narrativity. The introduction by the folk choir in the video functions as the exposition to the main theme, and its break on D-sharp with the fermata functions as the tense suspense in a frustrated anticipation of the resolution into the tonic of C-sharp minor. Following a two-beat rest, the dignified drums propel the syntax of the story of Ukraine’s heroic resistance against the Russian aggression into the structured artistic plot. Based on the pentatonic scale, David Gilmour’s guitar solo emblematizes other components of both literal and literary dramatic conflict: the highest notes represent the semanticized rising action leading to a “blue note” of F double-sharp that signifies the tension and climax in the musical plot. Gilmore’s musico-teleological tale ends with a descending scale that seems to be the equivalent to the falling action in drama, and finally resolves into a half, rather than full, cadence in G-sharp as if to suggest an open, brighter and victorious finale of yet-to-come resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war. A close musicological reading of the functioning of the harmonic sequences of cadences and the specifics of voice leading in the single reveals the musical artistic means of generating deep meanings and emotional understanding of history. Interpreted through the prism of intersemiotic scheme as emplotmet, the musical narrative has the attributes of a literary work - the beginning, development and suspense of the action, climax of dramatic conflict and its denouement. The paradigmatic affinity of narrative techniques in fiction and music brings new urgency to such fundamental ideas as Borgesian four invariant stories, which are recycled in various historical and ideological guises, or Bakhtinian distinction between the epic and the novel as a territory of encounter with the unfinished present, which expands the optics of reading the dynamics of consonant and dissonant intervals in the blues scale, and turns the music score into a novel. And vice versa: the function of the blue note in the pentatonic, bright and perfectly consonant five-step system without chromaticism, compels us to revisit Nietzsche and his philosophico-musical revelation about the interdependence of Apollo and Dionysus.