Derek Lim wrote: >Actually I must confess I am Chinese, and I play in a Chinese orchestra. >I do tend to have a certain bias, towards the notion that Mahler *must* >have heard Chinese music before, and that he did try to imitate both the >harmonies and sonorities, but that's about it. Derek, (and anyone else interested in the supposed Chinese elements in the music of Das Lied Von der Erde) really must read Donald Mitchell's "Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death" where the case for the "orientalism" (his word) is argued in depth. For Mitchell a simple "chinoiserie" would be the decoractive use of a pentatonic formula which can, he maintains, certainly be found in DLVDE, but that it goes much deeper than that. With this in mind DM goes on to quote T.W. Adorno as a crucial source in his exposition of this aspect of the work thus: "The exoticism does not confine itself to the deployment of pentatonic and wholetone scales, but moulds the entire texture". One of Mitchell's main tenets springs from what he maintains Adorno has in fact identified as, quoting him again: "the indistinct unison (unscharfe Unisono) in which identical parts are rhythmically a little out of step with one another - something that he (Mahler) had used since the Kindertotenlieder as a kind of improvised counterbalance to the excessive 'finish' characteristic of art songs" and which Mitchell himself labels "Heterophony". And Mitchell quotes Adorno again in referring to the "artificially high Chinese tessitura of the tenor part" in DLVDE. Here Mitchell maintains Adorno is referring to the high-pitched glottal style of Chinese opera as a possible influence. (Mitchell also refers to an article by John Williamson "Mahler and The Veni Creator Spiritus" in which Williamson talks of the "intricate polyphony - often verging on the *heterophonic*" in some of the Ruckert Songs and also in the Eighth Symphony Part I, so validating this important strand for Mitchell.) Mitchell then speculates on a source for Mahler's knowledge of this "heterophony" which is at the core of the Chinese dimension of DLVDE. Firstly he brings forward a piece of evidence contained in Henry-Louis de La Grange's Volume III - at the stage that HLG's Volume III was at the time Mitchell was writing his own Volume III in 1985. (So it is, of course, quite possible that M. de La Grange has more thoughts about the piece of evidence Mitchell refers to 12 years on.) It is that the banker Paul Hammerschlag recalled visiting Mahler at Toblach in the last two weeks of the Summer of 1908 and that he had given Mahler some cylinders of Chinese music, made in China, that he had bought in Vienna. The implication being that here is evidence Mahler had actually heard Chinese music before composing DLVDE. For Mitchell questions are raised. (Which is why I wonder whether M. de La Grange now has anything to add!) What kind of music was on the cylinders? Was it vocal? If it was then Adorno's point about Chinese opera becomes even more interesting. In which year did Hammerschlag give Mahler the cylinders? DLVDE was composed between 1907 and 1909 with the "main thrust" of the work in the Summer of 1908. For the cylinders to be influential on DLVDE they have to have been in Mahler's possession, Mitchell maintains, by 1907. However, Adorno (and Mitchell and Williamson) maintain the heterophonic principle can be found in the late Ruckert Songs from 1901-2. Mahler first met Hammerschlag in 1900. Did he give him the cylinders then? As Mitchell observes, there is more research to be be done and, for all I know, it may have been!!! However, Mitchell has another string to his bow for an Oriental musical influence on Mahler in DLVDE. In 1908 Mahler's friend Guido Adler published an article "Uber Heterophonie" which is a brilliant example of current thinking on musical traditions other than Western in circles that Mahler moved in. Of course, as Mitchell points out, when it was published work on DLVDE was already substantially finished, but it must have been the result of long research and preparation during which time the two friends *might* have discussed the subject. But even if they hadn't the fact of what had to have been a long gestation proves at least what Mitchell calls a "cultural preoccupation" that does predate DLVDE. Mitchell helps by reproducing a translation of the entire article in his book and points out that you could be forgiven for mistaking it as a description of the techniques encountered in DLVDE. Tony Duggan Staffordshire, United Kingdom.