Mahler and More, Pt. I

My enchantment with the music of Gustav Mahler began many years ago when my brother began listening to Mahler's First Symphony and associated it with the sunrise and the beginning of each new day. The symphony is magnificent in scope, containing moments of great power, other times of serene tenderness, raw energy, dark mystery, fear, joy, confusion, and leading to sheer exhilaration at an ending worthy of complete expression of all that is good and affirming. Using sophistication of orchestration, musical craft, creative expansion of traditional harmonic practice, and complexity of expression, Mahler's music is all encompassing both musically and philosophically.

But this blog entry is not intended as an entry specifically about Mahler. Instead, it is meant to examine how to apply and comprehend Mahler's eclectic and exhaustive philosophical approach to life. Not that I am not tempted to write on Mahler and his music. His music continues to fascinate me, reach me, and I have yet to feel I have truly captured or understood all that his music entails or all that Mahler was trying to communicate. I could easily write several essays on each symphony and could spend an entire year devoted to careful study of each symphony and each piece that came from his pen. His considerable experience in conducting and interpretation found fruition in colorful orchestration, complex counterpoint, and melodic expansion beyond that of his contemporaries Anton Bruckner and Richard Wagner.

One characteristic of Mahler's music is the use of folk song for many of his melodies, folk songs rich in melodic interest, singable, heart-felt, buoyant rhythms, music of and for the common people. He, of course, was not the first nor last to use folk songs, a technique dating back to the inception of music; but using folk songs in his symphonic output was more than a compositional technique but instead became an extension of his world-view and philosophical approach to the arts. He was not necessarily attempting to create music that demonstrated how sophisticated he could make peasant music nor was he trying to educate the masses by finding a common ground and taking them to new territory. Mahler, rather, was attempting to reach all people.

Whether he accomplished his goal or not is debatable, but what is intriguing is to decipher his musical mission that he undertook by mingling the concepts of folk music and cultivated music, the masses and the elites, the uneducated and educated, the sheep and the goats, the thinkers and the laborers! Mahler's ultimate musical offering as seen in his symphonic output as well as his songs for voice was to create art that could be experienced openly and accessibly by all. It is art at its finest and the personal achievement of a brilliant man who embraced and journeyed with all of culture from the most commonplace to the most sublime.

In the next segment, let's look at Symphony No. 3 in more detail and examine it in terms of a general philosophy of life's experiences and purpose.