Gustav Mahler's path to the New Music: Musical time and modernism

The music of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) unfolds to a different sort of clock, and exudes a different sense of time, from that of other composers. Many passages, no two alike, are designed to defeat the strictures which promote a well-behaved, periodic temporal flow in the unfurling of a piece. Of the varieties of musical time that Mahler conjures in his compositions, his explorations of static temporality are among the most fascinating. In these examples, the forward propulsion normally associated with tonal music dissipates, and the ticking seconds seem to stand still.;The dissertation aims to investigate way stations on the path Mahler forged into a musical realm of unfettered temporality. The study begins with an analysis of the opening of Mahler's First Symphony (1889), which serves as an example of the suspended quality of musical time that Mahler developed in subsequent works. Thereafter, the focus turns to three orchestral songs composed within the next twelve years: the Nietzsche setting "O Mensch! Gib Acht!" (1896) from the Third Symphony, and two Ruckert settings, "Um Mitternacht" (1901) and "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" (1901). These works demonstrate that Mahler kept seeking new ways to achieve flexibility in the temporal aura of a work. Analysis of text, music, and sketch material for each piece illuminate the powerful influence that the poetry exercised in each song's musical conception, the composer's intent to manipulate musical time, and the technical arsenal he derived to achieve these ends.;In view of these findings, the dissertation uncovers an aspect of Mahler's music and compositional style that has not been sufficiently recognized. The project encourages further exploration of this aspect of Mahler's compositional practice, both in the works written before 1895, and those written after 1901. Indeed, the present endeavor in its entirety illustrates how far the composer eventually departed from the temporal aesthetic he had inherited, pointing the way to still more novel time worlds yet to come in the nascent "New Music."...