University of California Los Angeles Symphony No 10 Adagio Paper The theme that we have been following for the semester is the idea that Art is at heart a

University of California Los Angeles Symphony No 10 Adagio Paper The theme that we have been following for the semester is the idea that Art is at heart a Shamanistic practice. From the Chauvet Cave paintings to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, it can be argued that the greatest works of Art are attempting to achieve a transcendental bridge to the world of Spirit. Human beings through the ages have had an inchoate sense that there is a reality out of the sight of our physical senses. We can call this reality, the Spirit World, or following the ideas of modern string theory, we can understand it as “higher dimensions.” For ancient and aboriginal cultures, this is the realm of Shamanism, for “civilized” societies, it became the source of religions, but these religions mostly become political tools of hierarchy and oppression. GUSTAV MAHLER and the end of “La belle époque”
The theme that we have been following for the semester is the idea that Art is at heart a
Shamanistic practice. From the Chauvet Cave paintings to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, it
can be argued that the greatest works of Art are attempting to achieve a transcendental bridge
to the world of Spirit. Human beings through the ages have had an inchoate sense that there is
a reality out of the sight of our physical senses. We can call this reality, the Spirit World, or
following the ideas of modern string theory, we can understand it as “higher dimensions.” For
ancient and aboriginal cultures, this is the realm of Shamanism, for “civilized” societies, it
became the source of religions, but these religions mostly become political tools of hierarchy
and oppression.
The Protestant Reformation in Europe broke the spiritual hegemony of the Church in Rome and
freed the individual to cultivate a personal connection with spirit through prayer and
contemplation of the Gospels of Jesus, newly disseminated in translation via the printing press.
The Enlightenment revealed a scientifically “knowable” world and further weakened the hold of
religion. At the beginning of the 19th century, artists such as Goethe and Beethoven saw that
the fading of the power of religion and the rise of material wealth was causing people to lose
their connection to the afore-mentioned inchoate sense of the “spiritual,” and was having a
negative impact on the “goodness” of society.
Bruno Walter was a German musician born into a non-religious Jewish family in Berlin. He is
recognized as one of the greatest orchestral conductors of the 20th century and was a devotee
of Gustav Mahler and a great champion and interpreter of his music. It is interesting to read his
memoir in which, even though raised in a non-religious environment, he talks about great
music having a moral and spiritual force to the benefit of society. There have certainly been
“pop” composers in the Western Art Music tradition, most of their names are either forgotten
or are on the margins of the concert halls of today as “novelties.” It is not fashionable in postmodern art criticism to speak of Great Artists; we live in an era where our ideas of “political
correctness” lead us to a stance of “cultural relativity” in which we are not supposed to make
value judgements about “high culture” vs. “popular culture.”
The end of the 19th Century has been called “La belle époque” because the material wealth of
the Industrial Age had achieved a “Gold Age” for many. This era came to an end in the horrors
of World War One, with its trench warfare resulting in the death of tens of millions of young
men in the armies of the European nations. Sending infantry out across open barbed-wireprotected lines against machine guns and accurate artillery, caused casualty rates of 90%, while
achieving no strategic success. The sense that governments and power structures don’t care
about regular people, so powerful in today’s politics, was born on Flanders fields in WWI.
Earlier in the semester we considered the story of Carl Jung (1875-1961), the great Swiss
psychologist and his researches into the “unconscious.” He often referred to the unconscious as
the primitive mind and observed that aboriginal cultures relied more on the unconscious than
the conscious for survival. Jung was careful in his formal scientific writing and presentations to
not get too “woo-woo”?, but if you read his memoir “Memories, Dreams and Reflections,” you
will see that he could be seen as having engaged in modern shamanism. The most powerful tool
in his psychological practice was the interpretation of dreams. Jung reports in his memoir, that
beginning around 1911, he and many of his close friends who shared his instincts started having
horrific dreams of barbaric bloodshed and fields of corpses. He even worried that he was
becoming psychotic and then in 1914, WWI began and he understood that his unconscious was
“seeing” the future. When Jung built his stone tower retreat by hand on Lake Zurich, he
declined to have electricity or a phone because (he tells us in his memoir) that it interfered with
the communication with the Ancestor Spirits.
Jung’s Tower
The hearth in Jung’s tower. He’s operating the bellows for the stove.
GUSTAV MAHLER
Gustav Mahler was intentionally shamanistic in his creative approach. His main career was as
an opera conductor, most famously of the Vienna Court Opera. Mahler was born in a small
town in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) and during the summers when the opera
season was over, he would retire to a summer house in the Bohemian forest that had a
separate workshop with no electricity where he did his composing.
Mahler’s composing hut
His summer “cottage”?
In all his music, Mahler self-professedly was seeking spiritual truth, both for himself and for his
audience. Mahler said that he put the whole world in his symphonies; indeed there are bird
calls, sleigh bells, cow bells, Klezmer music, military bands, Viennese waltzes, etc. He drew
inspiration from Nature and anonymous German folk poetry, but also from Goethe, Gregorian
chant and in das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) from ancient Chinese poetry. Like
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, he often included solo voices and choruses, most notably his
eighth symphony so-called the “Symphony of a Thousand” because of the huge numbers of
performers. The first movement of this symphony is based on the Latin hymn for Pentacost
Veni creator spiritus (Come Holy Spirit) and concludes with a setting of the mystical last scene
from Goethe’s Faust, the last words of which are “the eternal Feminine leads us on.” (Think
about the cave art and artifacts). His next work was das Lied von der Erde for tenor, soprano
and orchestra and ends with the reiterated line “the Earth goes on forever,” recognizing that a
human life is so brief, but the Earth might as well be understood as eternal. Mahler wrote das
Lied at a time when he knew that the end of his life was close. Mahler suffered his fatal illness
in 1911 in New York City, where he had taken the position of Music Director of the New York
Philharmonic, following a season as the director of the Metropolitan Opera. He sailed
(steamship, no planes yet) back to Europe hoping to be able to die in his native land. By the
time his ship arrived in Le Havre, he was in a coma. His music was not always appreciated or
understood in his time by the critics, but he was so popular among audience members that
when news got out that his “funeral train” was passing through Europe on the way to Vienna,
thousands of people turned out at the stations in the middle of the night to pay their respects
as his train passed. His wife, Alma (read her memoir of Mahler) reports that he only woke once
from his coma on that journey: he opened his eyes and said “ah, Mozart.” Was he hearing
Mozart’s music, or was Mozart coming to greet him? ?
THE ASSIGNMENT
For our final assignment we will be listening to the opening Adagio from Mahler’s tenth
symphony, which is the only movement that he completed. This piece was composed in 1911
and conveys by the end a sense of a calm acceptance of the end of life. The climactic moment
of this movement has the most complex and dissonant chord written up that time and can be
seen as expressing those nightmares of the coming bloodshed of 1914-18.
Mahler died before WWI began, but Carl Jung lived until 1961. Jung feared (as did many of us at
that time) that a nuclear WWIII was a distinct possibility. He felt that modern people were
suffering a spiritual crisis; one of his last books is titled “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.” The
fact that we have not engaged in a nuclear holocaust has not lessened our peril. Instead, we
find ourselves threatened by an environmental holocaust. The solution is still a spiritual one,
ultimately an issue of individual character. Why listen to the “great” music? Because it can
develop our moral and spiritual sense at the same time it “entertains” us, but it unfortunately
takes some work on our part (especially multiple hearings) to unlock its power.
Baroque music is perhaps the easiest to appreciate because, in accordance with the Doctrine of
the Affections, each movement devotes itself to only one emotion. The dialectic of sonata form
and the other forms of the Classical era lay out contrasting themes and emotions, but organized
in a rational sequence. Mahler’s music is much more like one’s internal life, moving from one
feeling to another, not necessarily in a rational sequence. Your job is to see if you can identify
the events in the Adagio from Mahler’s tenth symphony. There are four distinct musical ideas
that alternate in this piece and one cataclysmic moment. Use the Youtube timings from the
given recording to analyze the appearance of the various themes. Note that there are times
when more than one theme is being played simultaneously. Another thing that is very
interesting is that instead of playing whole themes and fragmenting them as Beethoven does,
Mahler actually builds his themes, giving them more extended treatment each time they recur.

Theme One – Solo viola line, practically atonal (not in a key), certainly ambiguous
Theme Two – Passionate theme (prominent horn solo) characterized by wide interval leaps,
stated also in its inversion, i.e. upside-down
Theme Three – A sophisticated dance theme, almost a waltz feel but in duple meter
Theme Four – A “spooky” theme featuring a solo violin and woodwinds
There is also a break from these themes in the first ten minutes that prefigures the arrival of
the “cataclysimic” chord that comes later.
There is a cadence around 21:37 where the piece could have logically ended musically speaking,
the rest can be considered coda. There is a new music that comes in that can be described as
heavenly. Can you locate it? What is the feeling of the last appearance of the Dance theme?
After you have listened to this for the timings you will be familiar with the themes. Go back and
listen to this with your eyes closed and tell me about your experience of this work. What are
the feelings you get? Are you comfortable with them? What is the feeling at the end? Most
important question: do you think that Art can answer existential questions?

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