Julian Johnson

Transformations of Musical Modernism

Profound transformations in the composition, performance and reception of modernist music have taken place in recent decades. This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the forms that musical modernism takes today, how modern music is performed and heard and its relationship to earlier music. In sixteen chapters, leading figures in the field and emerging scholars examine modernist music from the inside, in terms of changing practices of composition, musical materials and overarching aesthetic principles, and from the outside, in terms of the changing contextual frameworks in which musical modernism has taken place and been understood. Shaped by a ‘rehearing’ of modernist music, the picture that emerges redraws the map of musical modernism as a whole and presents a full-scale re-evaluation of what the modernist movement has been all about.

The Status of the Subject in Mahler's Ninth Symphony

A discussion of Mahlers music in terms of its articulation of a musical subject risks some obvious dangers. Not least, it risks sliding into the very ideology of which it seeks to provide a critique. Even the coincidence of the two words Mahler and subjectivity suggests a clich6 of popular aesthetics that constitutes the antithesis of this paper. Such clich6s have their origins, in part, in the programmatic panderings of nineteenth-century composers themselves. The blame, however, lies not so much with the composers as with the dominant mode of reception. Put simply, for an age in which the uniqueness of the individual subject is a central principle in aesthetics as much as politics, music is necessarily heard as addressed both to and from the individual. On this level, I suggest, our own age differs little from the nine-

Rehearing Lost Time: Proust and Mahler

Abstract Though Proust and Gustav Mahler never met and knew nothing of each other’s work, the parallels between the Proustian novel and Mahlerian symphony offer insights into both genres. Both question their most basic assumptions — about time, subjectivity, and the negotiation of private and public identities — but to explore this parallel requires going beyond a discussion of the function of music for Proust’s novels. It is found instead at the level of literary and musical structure, in terms of the temporal dislocations of narrative and musical form that enable the simultaneous narration of experience and a critical self-reflection upon that experience.

The Breaking of the Voice

Part I of this article explores instances in Mahler’s symphonies where the composer allows the continuity of the musical voice to break and to fall temporarily into silence. It analyses these in terms of seven different categories or compositional strategies – violent strikes, abysmal silence, draining away/falling apart, drowning out, hyperintensity, fragmentation, and strained voices. Part II considers the wider context for this breaking of the voice in literary and philosophical self-critiques of language contemporary with Mahler’s work, specifically Austro–German forms of Sprachkritik as in the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Fritz Mauthner, but also extending the parallel in less obvious directions to include Samuel Beckett. Taken together, the two parts of the article thus provide both evidence and historical context for a radical suggestion about Mahler’s music, that at the heart of the symphonic is a constant threat of the aphonic – a complete loss of voice. While such moments are rare in Mahler, they might be read as extreme manifestations of the self-consciousness of language to which all his music is subject.