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University of Utah radio presents music and other four letter words. Here is your host as author professor of music at the University of Utah Paul Batum. The. Bank
has given us Hong Kong. However advertently Occidental my bent may
be. I think perhaps my sound is not quite so Western when I sing as Harry Nilsson. Still it's good stuff miler we talk about today and not me. And he is somehow. In my mind. This week. Or maybe just it's a particular day. Somehow typical of Harry Nilsson's version of the Midnight Cowboy. Well come back to that in just a minute because it has great relevance and respect. Want to post a mother's words. Some of you I suppose are terribly literate. I read lots of books. I know lots of music hold and wondrous intellectual discussions with Friday Night groups. And somewhere in all of those many things that you know I suppose you do as I used to do when I too was young and foolish. I make prodigious quotes from all manner of impressive
sources. I think I'm going to have a lapse just now and do one of those things. One of the readers of the opposite of John Milton and I'm sure that there is scarcely a person out there who hasn't read that famous tract on the free press. Well remember at some point midway on that he says a curious thing assuredly he says we bring not innocence into the world we bring you impurity much rather than that which purifies us is trial. That sounds like a. Good. Story. The philosophy and the rooted somehow and they're basically a Puritan concept. I don't. Know about this generation and its feeling about accidents of birth the rights and wrongs and purities and impurities much. Has been said on the subject and too much is always said on the subject. But there is a feeling there is a
feeling in the life of Gustav Mahler's there's a feeling in that little song that you just listen to. There is sort of a rather widespread feeling among people that you and I know that once upon a time. Things were as Wordsworth said they were. Radiant in a way that there was a kind of splendor in the grass. But. Did the sun. Rise was a glorious birth and that there was a kind of newness accessible to us in the experience of the now. 14 or 15 we begin to grow jaded and by the time we are 20 in terms of experience we are old. And useless. And then the best we can do is to spend our days somehow. It was a great reaction against that feeling. Now. My reaction and the look of some people in the movement of some people in the city parks where some kinds of people like to be
as opposed to the four square walls which have characterized our established places that we call home. Gustav Mahler I suppose was one of those people who might for quite different reasons have. Have begun where Milton says we begin not to bring innocence into the world but impurity much rather. Than the boy who grows up in a fairly demented household who has to sort of make his own way and to do it roughly. Who looks at substantial people about him and I have no particular interest in taste and cultivation. Who would never know what to do with his season ticket to any symphony orchestra were it presented to them. And the legendary grandmother who is said to have walked all the way from Czechoslovakia to Vienna to see the emperor because her pension was going to be. Reduced or negated altogether. And who has also said managed the
interview with the Emperor and was sent back home in an official coach. Well the boy who is who is somehow. Next to strength and a certain kind of determination but who sees in him the behavior of people around him in the course of the world. A lot of instability a lot of ugliness and a lot of selfishness. He said later on in his life that he was he was the man who belonged to nowhere. He was not. Jewish. And he was Jewish. He was not a Christian and he was a Christian. He was not Austrian. And he was Austrian. He presided over the great sort of musical resources of. Vienna. And was accessible to no one. Once upon a time Gustav Mahler believed that way back when.
But there was a kind of way out that he could discern somehow behind what seemed to be all of the shifting closeness of things. Something the ultimate and something true and something bright. He thought he saw it in something like the same kind of mythology that Wagner had been talking about. He wasn't caught up in Nordic myths but he was caught up in the folk legends. He was drawn to folk poetry to making musical settings of folk poems as matter of fact. He was caught up in the mythology of Judaism and the notion of resurrection was not particularly literal to him but the fact the feeling that his things that he responded to at some important level in him was more real than a lot of other things that he was supposed to feel the in his everyday life. He was drawn to Christianity and to Roman Catholicism in particular because there too. Was a set of symbols which he really held to
maybe a little too desperately I don't know but held to because there was a time when it seemed to him that it was all right and that it was all true. And that God or some kind of ultimate and positive value was in fact accessible to man. When we listen to the music of Gustav Mahler from that time which was early in his life. We are most believe him. Was
the net. Yeah yeah
yeah yeah. He seems to have felt obliged in later years to say
good deal about this his second Resurrection Symphony by way of explanation and so that people would be certain to sort of feel what he had felt at the time. It's great young ghost stuff as a matter of fact who drawn as he was to both Beethoven and Schubert those those in many ways diametrically opposite persons spiritually at least in his young years chooses Beethoven over Schubert. This is his version of the mind of the Choral Symphony of Beethoven in the last movement of that Symphony of Beethoven God the loving Father presides. Over the clouds as you remember and all mankind somehow fall before him turned on to the fact of him by an awareness of love. Power of response in them. Some gift which everybody has. Blake would have called it imagination. Schiller called it the telephone the divine spark which just needs to be located. Wagner had had
talked about the light the light which was buried somehow interest and he's old and it turns out to be the same sort of thing which enables them to see that which is finally true when the circumstances are right for turning it on. Both Beethoven and Wagner felt that music was one of those circumstances if you wrote the right kind of music and ghost of Mahler seems to believe a good deal in the power of sonority and the human voice singing. And the fact of the folk with whom we readily identify because we are they and. There is no judgment pieces about the symphony. Maybe the dead are raised and they all move in a solemn procession when the great summons comes and they are supposed to stand before God to be judged of their works but they realize that what love ultimately means is that there is no judge. And when they have gone with whatever fear whatever remorse whatever awesome or anxious anticipation they carry.
They realize too. That was the judgment which they meta on themselves and that all to Love is accepting. And good. That's. That's a large sentiment. And Mahler's seem to be able to live with it for a long time. At least four symphonies worth. And then he said something catchy clues me happened in his spiritual life. And that when people heard his fifth symphony. They would be aware that that's. The same decisive moment it happened. In his own thinking in his own musical writing as it happened between say the second and the third of Beethoven's symphonies that he had entered another world. This was the dark world of the emotions this was done in these old Acts 1 and 2 except the Mahler is playing that drama backwards because his early music began
in act three. And suddenly comes to a great lapse of faith and we move on nice key like G major for the Fourth Symphony. To the furthest point away from that key. Technically C Sharp Minor which may even have been the deliberate choice on his part. As far away as we can get in terms of the tonality we begin and though we try for some kind of redemption in music of the people in the last movement of that symphony it is not quite possible to bring any kind of human voice into the context or any kind of specific text and certainly there is no reference and any of these symphonies five six or seven to anything like God or love or light in any unequivocal way. He finally gets around to riding high in order to avoid writing a ninth symphony a song cycle.
A set of six poems to medieval Chinese texts which he called the Song of the earth. The thing that interests me most about this and which brings us back to the opening of this program is that having exploited most of the categories accessible to men. He doesn't is a delight in the sense of art the writing of poetry. The look of association confraternity going pretty much the Schubert route. It appears that the late Mahler ends up in the back. Room alone with something like the specter of Franz Schubert and not to lose big fun Beethoven at all anymore. The last song of the song of the earth which some people regard as the most significant perhaps early. Composition of this century and perhaps even the greatest of Gustav Mahler's musical writing. Is Midnight Cowboy music. It begins at night. The world has gone to sleep.
The world is finally illusory and sleep is the great symbol for everybody works. Everybody writes poems everybody makes is good contribution to history and civilization. When it's all over everybody goes to sleep for one reason only to dream about other better things which of course cannot be true because they are only dreams. They try to find forgotten youth in their dreams they try to find true beauty that is whatever was Plato's absolute of which all of the things that we do seem to be only shadows and reflections. There in the midnight hour he stands. By his salute. At his side. He is the maker of music. Sounds like a Schubert in the winter journey. Who stands watching somebody else grinding the organ and knows that this is in a way typical of him. The maker of song salute is at his side and he waits in the midnight for someone to come galloping up. Well his version of the cowboy comes galloping up. Not quite the
folk but for all we know all that's left of the horse appears out of the dark shadows of the orchestra. It's hard to know who's speaking to whom in the last part of this song because the syntax is deliberately unclear and the person this fake. The friend steps down or reaches down from the horse. The cup of farewell. Someone says to someone in that darkness where no one can see any face too clearly. Where am I going. I'm going to wander in the mountains and find some kind of peace for my lonely heart. I'm going to wander to my native land my home wherever that is. I'm not going to roam abroad anymore because it's vanity and it's tiresome this my heart is quiet and waiting everywhere for
your loss and spring and grows green again everywhere forever horizons are blue and bright. Always always always. This will be true. And I wait. There is a strong. Statement. About alienation if you will on. Loneliness and the fact of not being able to communicate. There is a sad a kind of desperate anxiety about having spent one's life and all of his energies in something which history has always regarded as sacred and true. The pursuit of beauty which we call art and discovering that that too is then ity.
And that all of the strength that a man has to give in the end. Is reduced to waiting. And he can't see. His home and he doesn't know the route. He has no map and that he can do is hope. And he doesn't know how long the hope will last or if it is one of those final sort of conditions of his spiritual life. Well Mahler put all this into one text one song which does Schubert. It is called i am dead to the world and I think perhaps we deserve to listen to it although it is not really all that pleasant. Either. That used to take notice of me doesn't know about me anymore because I am alone in my song in my life and my love and everything. I have no relation to it. There is just me waiting.
This has been music and other four letter words featuring
Paul Bunn an associate professor of music at the University of Utah music another four letter words is a production of University of Utah radio executive director Rex Campbell series director Gene tak. This series is made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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Series
Music and other four letter words
Episode Number
13
Episode
Gustav Mahler, Midnight Cowboy
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-c24qpp2w
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Description
Description
No description available
Topics
Music
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:29:27
Credits
AAPB Contributor Holdings
University of Maryland
Identifier: 4933 (University of Maryland)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Duration: 00:30:00?
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Citations
Chicago: “Music and other four letter words; 13; Gustav Mahler, Midnight Cowboy,” University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 29, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-c24qpp2w.
MLA: “Music and other four letter words; 13; Gustav Mahler, Midnight Cowboy.” University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 29, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-c24qpp2w>.
APA: Music and other four letter words; 13; Gustav Mahler, Midnight Cowboy. Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-c24qpp2w