Open Collections

Vici, Gabriella

University of British Columbia

Hybridity in music is most often considered a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. However, for those original turn-of-the-century musical modernists, particularly Gustav Mahler, such heterogeneity can be seen as a central feature of their compositional habits and modes of expression. Mahler’s fin-de-siècle hybridity manifests not only in the vibrant yet underexplored space between quotation and allusion, as in late-twentieth-century polystylism and Charles Ives’ prewar collage techniques, but also in narrative, programmaticism, and hyperbolized use of topic. While analysts of Mahler often note a marked heterogeneity in his works, no theoretical framework has hitherto been applied to interpret this crucial aspect of his oeuvre. In exploring this illuminating analytical perspective, I draw upon a variety of theoretical constructs to interpret several of Mahler’s symphonic movements. Central to this approach is Bruno Alcalde’s framework of mixture strategies; although initially intended for the likes of post- war composers such as Alfred Schnittke and George Rochberg, Alcalde demonstrates that this system can be applied as a flexible, ostensibly neutral tool to any works featuring hybrid environments. Furthermore, since the expression of style and genre in Mahler is often heavily tied to the exaggeration or distortion of topics, I supplement Alcalde’s strategies with both narrative and topic theory, placing particular emphasis on Robert Hatten’s concept of “troping.” Rounding out this core set of techniques is a theoretical repurposing of Theodor Adorno’s concept of novelistic “characters,” which I apply as a construct for understanding how hybrid environments play out on the thematic level. By combining these diverse analytical methods into one, adaptable theoretical approach, my ultimate aims are both to anatomize the mechanisms of Mahler’s hybridity technique and to interpret this prominent compositional feature as an enlightening link between an intricate web of signification and the music itself.

Text

2023-04-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84325

Music - Theory

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/