Ed Zubrow writes of Mahler's fifth: >The stylistic evolution from Brahms' music was cited and this is >where my question arises. Certainly the "melody riding on a cushion of >accompaniment" describes homophonic music. And, in Brahms and those who >inspired him, we see the beauty of polyphonic voices: multiple thoughts >but all related to each other and joined by formal properties. So, if >Mahler represents something new; if it is neither homophonic or polyphonic; >what is it? It's polyphonic, but with a greater degree of independence in each line and, characteristically, more lines. Melody with accompaniment is not necessarily homophonic, but you do usually know which is which. Mahler has this in the 5th symphony as well, just as Brahms has great independence of line in such passages as the culminating passacaglia of the Haydn Variations. But in general, greater independence of voices tends to blur background/foreground distinctions. One thing Zander might be getting at is the proportions of such passages in each composer. Occurrences highly independent counterpoint in Mahler probably take up more of the piece. >How do we characterize this style? indeed what keeps it from disintegrating >into cacaphony? Is Mahler truly an innovator here or are there others >moving simultaneously towards this? "Cacaphony" is often in the ear of the beholder. It generally indicates that the listener cannot make enough sense out of what he's hearing, as opposed to the contention that there is no inherent sense to be made. It's hard for me to conceive of a completely meaningless piece of music, but I can't rule it out. Composers try to work against such muddle by keeping "planes of sound" distinct. This is often Mahler's tactic - separating the orchestra into registers or timbres and assigning a particular musical idea to a specific division. One also notes this in Ravel, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Prokofiev, and Rubbra. However, there's also those miracles of orchestration - Hindemith's Mathis der Maler, the finale to Mahler's 5th and Vaughan Williams's 4th, Webern's arrangement of the Bach Ricercar from the Musical Offering - in which everything seems "jumbled up" coloristically, yet contrapuntally clear. We must also mention the performer's role, since none of this happens by itself. A bad performance can give a completely erroneous impression of a work. At any rate, many other composers move toward this kind of contrapuntal independence - Taneyev has been mentioned, but also Reger and others. In fact, it seems a characteristic of Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian music in general to load a passage with several counter-lines - in Wagner's case, often to increase the amount of dramatic allusion of a passage by combining several different motifs. Steve Schwartz