Stirling Newberry "rasch aber leicht" wites:

>Pablos argument does not address this contention, and hence I cannot reply
>to an his statements addressed to some phantom in the corner.

Well. Let's see what does this phantom consists of:

>To Mahler's age the natural place and focus of art was the Pastoral and
>the visions of Nature But Mahler and others saw, clearly, that the Urban
>was to replace it, and that an Urban life must be based on machines and
>relationships between people - rather than Nature

This goes far beyond my dominion of english, but I'll do the best I can to
exlain myself. By 1909, this "view" was very old. Too old..Every romantic
artist seemed to complain about it many decades ago (in England, at least
since the times of Ludd's followers). Even more: the anguish about "urban
replacing nature" is a topic which comes from the times of Erasmus, if not
earlier, and it's a constitutive element of Modernist view of nature. At
the beginning of the XX century this topic was a truism, a "naivete".
Excuse this criminal generalization, but there were two visions over the
cultural history of Europe: a "pessimist" one (Nietszche, Spengler & Co.),
and an "optimist" one (the socialist utopy, which looked so innocent
then...). By those times it was expected from an artist to be (consciously
or not) in one side or in another. Mahler, in part --at least in his
social-political thinking-- was near to the second one (his contacts
with Adler --brother to Guido Adler, the musicologist-- and the viennese
socialists were very asiduous). Of course,  he was probably nearer to
the Fabian socialism than to Adler, but this leads us to the following
consideration: he was in some degree a social optimist (ie: an up-to-date
socialist), or he was simply a deceived ingenuous. If Mahler was only a
nostalgic of "Pastoral and visions of Nature", then he wasn't fitted to
express the cultural crisis of "fin de siecle", which was very far from
being simply the death of an idyll.

>What was collapsing in Mahler's time was the assumed social relationships
>that held up the 19th century, and by extension, the artistic symbols
>which corresponded to them.

Right, but Schoenberg, Webern and Berg were expressing much deeply the
wreck of the "assumed social relationships that held up the 19th century",
and they made it shaking directly the roots of established musical
language, an attempt which Mahler only *seemed* to do.  That's what I meant
when I wrote: "as a parody of cultural history the Ninth symphony was
already *impotent*.  What kind of parody are we going to perceive in a work
which musical history, by those times, had overpassed?".

PS: Why is always Mahler the subject of this kind of social-cultural
considerations? Why not Bruckner, that "simple austrian peasant who doesn't
exists beyond his inner world..."?

Pablo Massa
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