image from Saskiasanter, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

There are a few things that prompted what I believe will be a new series:

1. The aforementioned listening charts for comparing cycles of the Mahler and Bruckner symphonies
2. Another only tenuously related writing project I can’t currently link and that won’t ever appear here anyway
3. A desire to continue to post here more regularly but without the time to put into researching and preparing pieces I’d love to write about, like Ireland’s piano concerto, Sæverud’s cello concerto, or works from Unsuk Chin, Feldman, and others

So then… why not write in a slightly different way about pieces that I have come to know and love, less from an objective “this is what this piece is about” angle and more of a “this is how I feel about this piece, and what it reminds me of, and how I think of it, and what it means to me.”

That is, granted, a more personal approach. While the individual is unavoidable in any kind of writing (i.e. that’s not at all to say that I wasn’t present as the writer/interpreter/narrator of the thousand other articles I wrote), I don’t want to (seem to) aspire to any idea that anyone on the internet cares more how I feel about Mahler than just about Mahler’s works themselves.

But like I said, I’m also trying to be more regular about writing, here as well as elsewhere, so I figure this is a good place to work on that.

Symphonic Mnemonics

How do you think of symphonies of a composer? How do you differentiate them? They all have personalities, right? Once you get to know them, in the context of, for example, Mahler, just the digit 1, or 6, or 8 will call to mind an entire landscape (or a universe, as the case may be) and the experiences that you have had upon it. Prior to that familiarity, though, there was a time when I as an unfamiliar listener was trying to remember which Mahler symphony was which, and the ones that had (nick)names obviously lent themselves to holding those tags, but it was something like the below:

1. The ‘Titan’ one, with the Frère Jacques funeral march
2. Resurrection, easy. The first Mahler I really came to know
3. The ‘creation’ one, the one that begins deep down in the earth and rises to heaven
4. The one that is in heaven, with the soloist at the end
5. The five-movement “new era” one, with the adagietto
6. The ‘Tragic’ funeral march one
7. The ‘night’ one
8. Choral
9. The death one (I put off listening to the ninth for a long time)
10. The unfinished one (ditto here, but for different reasons)

Das Lied is just Das Lied.

Anyway, I don’t know how long any of these articles will be or if I will have anything original to say about them, but it’s enough justification for me to say that I want to revisit these, write an article about my thoughts and/or experiences with each one, and just maybe see if anyone has anything similar to say about them.

Baffling Bruckner

This should probably be, and probably will be, a separate article, but my experience with Bruckner has been so different than listening to Mahler. Mahler took me a lot of time to get into just for the pure enormity of the pieces and all that they contained, and it was really a challenge to warm up to his work. I thought it would just take the right recording(s) for it to click, and then I DID find a cycle that I felt like was the gateway for me to start vibing with Bruckner. That said, it could have just been that those few listens, of whichever conductor it happened to be, would be my breakthrough, but it happened to be this one set, which I still do love.

In any case, I have over the last few years been drawn much more to Bruckner’s music than Mahler’s, but still found it somewhat difficult to view the symphonies as so uniquely different and varied as I did Mahler’s, but I won’t subscribe to the “He wrote the same symphony 9/10/11 times” statement.

That is to say that a Bruckner Meditations series (that will of course have to be alliterative) will come at some as yet undetermined future date.

Recapitulation

For now, though, I’ll try to get an article up about the next symphony of Mahler’s (in numerical order) every few weeks, maybe. Join me, maybe?