Funded Research project
Mahler, Music, Culture: Discourses of Meaning

Dates

Start date: 1 January 2010
End date: 31 December 2010

Summary

Jeremy Barham  (monograph)

During a period of significant Mahler landmarks (150th anniversary of his birth (2010), and centenary of his death (2011)), and at the time of his apparent consolidation within the scholarly canon through a) the publication of substantial compendia (for example, Barham (ed.), Perspectives on Gustav Mahler (Ashgate, 2005) and Barham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (CUP, 2007)), and b) the Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft’s revision of the Complete Critical Edition of his works, this book addresses certain prevailing theoretical assumptions and historical gaps in the contextual understanding of his music. It investigates interrelations between Mahler’s music and the late 19th-/early 20th-century wider political, intellectual and artistic context - tensioned between idealism and modernism - in which it was created and to which it contributed. It examines the validity of the very methods by which such an investigation considers issues of musical autonomy and context, engages processes of mediation, draws interpretative conclusions and articulates musical meaning. Mahler’s music is therefore situated more fully in the cultural practice of its own historical period, and its signifying potential re-evaluated in the light of the developing climate of musicological practice in our current times.

Funding

The Donald Tovey Memorial Prize (awarded by Oxford University's Faculty of Music)