Pablo Massa:

>An easy view of Mahler. The problem is that it's not only easy, but false.
>He was deeply bound to that "peasant romance" (see all his lieder output),
>and it's deformation is a matter much more complex (and rich) than a simple
>attack. Concerning academicism and criticism (which were not the same
>thing, I repeat), Mahler did not intend a revolution against it. His
>problems with the musical world of its times were not the criticisms on
>his particular symphonic wiew, but the silence about his work. The second
>part of this paragraph suggests a "deconstructive" Mahler. This could be
>interesting to some modern intellectuals, but is far from historical
>reality (Actually, this is an unelegant way to say that a deconstructive
>Mahler is not interesting to me).

Mahler's work was not passed over in silence - but ridiciuled and attacked
as "gigantic", "misproportioned" and "filled with every musical joke". He
was criticised for basing his symphonic forms on songs, and for not writing
counterpoint.

Mahler had been, indeed, bound up in the peasant romance genre, and even
arranged many of the details of his life and working method around it. *But
not in the 9th symphony* -

Of course the sympony is more complex than Mahler deconstructing his
own age, but deconstruction of the 19th century was one of the favorite
pastimes of many of its greatest composers - either in music or in words.
Indeed the general terror of a degeneracy, where the roots of the culture
collapsed, was endemic to a good fraction of late 19th century
intelligentia. They were right, the roots of their civilization were being
eaten away, but their ideas as to what and wny were generally wrong.

While it is a mistake to ignore the pure musical ideas opperative in a
Mahler symphony, it is impossible to ignore the fact that he was a deeply
phiosophical composer, and that his structures are often dicated by the
philosophical concept that he wished to embody or express. He had, like
many such composers, a very love hate relationship with this - writing and
withdrawing programs, hiding meanings, leaving annotations on the score
about his personal existance and then covering them over.

I never claimed that Mahler's so value was for his deconstructions of his
own age - indeed if it were we wouldn't be interested in him except as a
kind of musical Spengler - but it is part of his value, and part of the
engine which drove him. This is not unusual in composers - very often a
composer is attempting to create a world in sound which does not exist,
but which he would like to exist, and music offers a way of transporting
the listener to that world in a vividness that words cannot offer, because
they feel themselves living in it. This aspect is present in the work of
Beethoven and Wagner, and Schumann and Brahms, and Sibelius as well. One
can even point to a few modern composers who feel this way...

Stirling Newberry