On Tuesday, September 20, 2016 at 2:50:37 PM UTC-10, abras...@gmail.com wrote:
> BARTON SWAIM
> First loathing, then loving, the all-encompassing symphonies of Gustav Mahler.
>
> I never cared much for the music of Gustav Mahler. I tried to like it, but without success. The problem, for me, wasn’t that Mahler was modern or unapproachable or “difficult.” Somehow, and despite a natural predisposition against modernism of all kinds, I had learned to appreciate the music of Schoenberg and particularly Shostakovich. Mahler’s symphonies, though, which in one sense are much more approachable and “tonal” than that of modernist composers (he’s commonly categorized as “late Romantic” rather than modern) struck me as deliberately incoherent. Twenty years ago I bought recordings of all nine, listened to them dutifully, but with only the partial exception of the First Symphony, the “Titan,” couldn’t make anything of them. I’ve seen various ones performed on different occasions, but rarely with profit. His famous remark to the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, endlessly recited in discussions of Mahler’s music—“The symphony is the world! The symphony must embrace everything!”—sounded to me like highfalutin hooey.
>
> What was it that irritated me about it? Mahler frequently gives you a ravishingly beautiful passage, but then overtakes it with a completely different thematic idea that (a) sometimes isn’t even in the same key and (b) seems designed to convey a mood totally foreign to the first one. Or he begins with a well-wrought melody, but rather than develop it or transition from it, he combines it with some angular phrase and develops that. Or he gives you an inane little fragment of a melody and creates a mad orchestral dance around it, as if the melodic fragment had been worth something in the first place. That, at any rate, is how I felt about it.
> I didn’t get it. Great composers always seem to be saying something with their music, and whatever Mahler was saying didn’t make sense to me...
>
> more: http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/09/17/music-thats-everything/

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lewis-thomas/late-night-thoughts-listening-mahlers-ninth/