Experiencing Mahler: A Listener's Companion

by Arved Ashby

Experiencing Mahler surveys the symphonies and major song sets of Gustav Mahler, presenting them not just as artworks but as vivid and deeply felt journeys. Mahler took the symphony, perhaps the most tradition-bound genre in Western music, and opened it to the widest span of human experience. He introduced themes of love, nature, the chasmic depth of midnight, making peace with death, facing rebirth, seeking one’s creator, and being at one with God. Arved Ashby offers the non-specialist a general introduction into Mahler’s seemingly unbounded energy to investigate the elements that make each work an experiential adventure—one that has redefined the symphonic genre in new ways.In addition to the standard nine symphonies, Ashby discusses Das Lied von der Erde, the three most commonly heard song sets (the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder, and Rückert-Lieder), and the unfinished Tenth Symphony (in Cooke’s edition).Experiencing Mahler is a far-reaching and often provocative search for meaning in the music of one of the most beloved composers of all time.

337 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 8, 2020

About the author

Associate Professor, School of Music, Ohio State University

Areas of Expertise
• Music of fin-de-siécle Vienna
• Modernism and postmodern thinking
• Composition and music criticism
• Mass media, film studies, popular culture and historiography

Professor Ashby, a Fulbright scholar and AMS 50 fellow, studies European and American art music of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His doctoral work was a study of the compositional aesthetics and methodologies of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite for string quartet (1926). The compositional aspects and aesthetic implications of the Schoenberg-Berg relationship are the focus of an article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society for which he received the 1996 Alfred Einstein Award from the AMS. He edited and contributed to the book Listening to Modernism: Intention, Meaning, and the Compositional Avant-garde (University of Rohester Press). Professor Ashby has also published on Berg’s revisionist use of Peter Altenberg’s poetry in his Altenberg-Lieder, Benjamin Britten’s Symphonic Output, and Frank Zappa’s Orchestral Works. A recent JAMS article ("Schoenberg Boulez and Twelve-Tone Composition as Ideal-Type") discusses twelve-tone music from a cultural-historical perspective, using models from social science and the history of science. He has contributed to the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and wrote criticism for the American Record Guide between 1987 and 2001.

Education
• PhD, Yale University
• M Phil, Yale University
• BM, Northwestern University
• BA, English, Northwestern University