Methodological considerations

The reception history of a composer comprises the sum of inherited accounts, condensed over time into a reflection of that person and his or her work. It is defined by all existing sources and testimonies, some of which are handed down without question while others are critically scrutinized. Changes in historically recorded contexts and revisions of aesthetic judgements are rare. In such cases reception history can have a corrective function and can uncover and identify processes of evaluation. Up to the early 1990s, research in reception history was developed in German-speaking musicology with the aim of describing anew the interplay between author, text and reader, or between composer, work and listener. At the heart of this lay questions involving aesthetic expectations and their fulfilment. Whilst at the beginning of the 1990s such research was still seen as a forward-looking model for new academic practice, it has not yet established itself accordingly. In this context Mahler reception history offers a prototype for investigations which reveal a dramatic picture of scholarly history over long stretches of time. Indeed Carl Dahlhaus refers to the special status of research into Mahler reception as a ‘history of events’.

Through this, the interplay between institutions and individuals responsible for handing down traditions can be clarified. Preconditions for this type of almost Foucauldian archaeological investigation are the comprehensive research, analysis and evaluation of source materials from different institutions. For example, it has been possible to reconstruct from these the course of almost one hundred years in the performance history of the Third Symphony.

'Wherever I hang me knickers - that's my home', declares the Guyanese- British poet Grace Nichols. Immersed in the sensory present of London and yet vividly remembering her former life in the Caribbean, she gives utterance to a diasporic sensibility, 'divided to de ocean / Divided to de bone'. Her poem enacts these split affinities in code-switching between Guyanese Creole ('me knickers') and Standard English ('my home') and shuttling imagistically between the Caribbean's 'humming-bird splendour' and London's 'misty greyness'. What are the implications of such ocean-splayed, register-shifting poetry for how we understand the relation of poetry to place? In modern and contemporary poetry studies, place is often conceived as either indefinite and abstract, or determinate and highly particularised. Modernist poetry, for example, has normally been understood as arising out of the shocks of modernity, wherever collisions between tradition and modernisation have arisen. At the same time, regionally defined poetries - e.g., the poetry of Northern Ireland or the New York school - are often seen as springing from the soil of a specific location. Yet neither the Aeolian model of poetry as airborne and placeless nor the Antaean model of poetry as drawing strength from a particular earthly plot is adequate to the poetry of geographic and cultural displacement - a poetry of multiple and mobile 'positionings', in Stuart Hall's term. In this chapter, I explore postcolonial and especially black British poetry as translocal - that is, as poetry that reconceives and remaps widely disparate geocultural spaces and histories in relation to one another, particularly in this instance metropolitan Britain as seen by migrants from its former colonies.

In their formally patterned styles and rural sympathies, the poets in this chapter are usually understood as a more traditional alternative to the metropolitan Modernism of Eliot and Pound. But rather than judge poetry on a scale of progression, it is perhaps more illuminating to ask what those styles enabled each poet to say which could not be said in the Modernists' freer or more fragmented forms. Each poet deals with division and constraint, in some way, whether it is the sense of despairing Fate for Hardy and Housman, or the mind's own differences from itself in Mew and Thomas. Each, too, ironises conventions of rural idyll to express their sense of being haplessly at odds with the social world. As such, they have been as powerful an influence on post-1950 British poetry as the Modernists, who for their part generally respected this distinctive poetry when they knew it. If Pound could name Hardy one of his greatest influences, then it should be possible to explore why this poetry, too, has its meaning and moment in the upheavals and uncertainties of the twentieth century.

Fastidious, venomously critical and glacially silent to all but a few, A. E. Housman (1859-1936) was no one's idea of a hedonist. But this is what he called himself late in life, when he seems to have thawed enough to think it worthwhile patiently correcting for posterity a young American correspondent, Houston Martin, who had called his verse the work of a Stoic pessimist:

Monteverdi's move to Venice as maestro di cappella of the basilica of S. Marco in 1613 ostensibly forced a shift in his professional commitments away from court music in favour of the church. However, the impact was not necessarily as marked as one might expect. In fact, notwithstanding the size and complexity of Monteverdi's two ‘Venetian’ collections of sacred music – the Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the posthumous Messa … et salmi (1650), plus a few pieces in anthologies – the composer published surprisingly few of the sacred and spiritual works that he must have written during his thirty years at S. Marco. Conversely, and despite appearances (five madrigal books published by 1605, only three from 1614 to 1638, plus a further posthumous volume in 1651), Monteverdi's secular output remained significant in terms both of surviving works and of what we know (from his letters and other sources) of his musical commitments.

However, there are a number of diffculties in assessing this output. One, also shared with the sacred music, concerns chronology. Monteverdi published his Sixth Book of Madrigals in 1614, his Seventh in 1619 and his Eighth in 1638. Between the Seventh and Eighth Books came reissues of Monteverdi's first six books of madrigals (1620–22), of the Seventh (1622, 1623, 1628) and of the 1607 Scherzi musicali (1628); the 1623 edition of the Lamento d'Arianna (also including the lettera amorosa and partenza amorosa from the Seventh Book); an edition corrected by Monteverdi of Arcadelt's four-voice madrigals (Rome, 1627); the second book of Scherzi musicali of 1632; and a few settings included in anthologies edited by Venetian associates such as Giovanni Battista Camarella (?1623) and Carlo Milanuzzi (reissue of 1624), or by the printers Bartolomeo Magni (1624) and Alessandro Vincenti (1634).

‘Farewells’ and new beginnings in the Ninth Symphony

As noted in the previous chapter, Mahler was reported to have had a superstitious fear of completing a ninth symphony, believing that since Beethoven and Bruckner number nine had been the furthest that a symphonic composer could progress. Mahler attempted to avoid this fate when he composed Das Lied von der Erde, his actual ‘ninth’. Such arguments are supported by the fact that Mahler had been diagnosed with a serious heart problem in 1907 which made him aware of the limited time remaining to him. He also had had to cope with the death of his daughter Maria that year, and it is therefore not surprising that Mahler approached his Ninth in a particular frame of mind, denying himself from the start music of a celebratory nature. However, in view of the advanced stage of the sketches for the Tenth symphony, it is inappropriate to call the Ninth Mahler's final ‘farewell’ to the world, as did many reviewers of the posthumous first performance. If anything, the Ninth, together with Das Lied von der Erde and the sketches for the Tenth, could be seen as a ‘farewell’ trilogy, particularly since all three works mark a clear break with the preceding Eighth Symphony and embody Mahler's late style.

In an anonymous letter, written just two years before Monteverdi died, and printed with the libretto of his opera Le nozze d'Enea con Lavinia, the author recommends the composer to the audience and imagines the fate of his music in the far-distant future:

The future predicted in this letter seems substantially to have come true. Centuries after his death Monteverdi's works continue to be appreciated in far-flung parts of the world, they continue to console us, and we still think of Monteverdi as a great musical figure. As for the ravages of time, over three hundred of his works have managed to survive together with one hundred and twenty-seven of his letters and numerous other documents directly relevant to his life and times.

The mere fact of the survival of many of Monteverdi's compositions would be remarkable, but his music has also accomplished something else: it has reached out to exert a formidable influence on the imaginations of many recent composers. Numerous adaptations and arrangements of his works have appeared over the past hundred years (those by D’Indy, Orff, Respighi, Hindemith, Maderna and Henze are only the most famous), and his musical procedures have shown a remarkable capacity to insinuate themselves almost seamlessly into the creative fabric of our modern musical languages.

Stuff Happens, David Hare’s 2004 play about the Iraq war, begins with a parade of the Republicans. Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice all take the stage in turn.

Colin Powell tells us what he learned about the nature of war while fighting in Vietnam: ‘After Vietnam many in my generation vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons . . . War should be the politics of last resort.’

Donald Rumsfeld comes on next as ‘one-time champion wrestler, University of Chicago’ and ex-assistant to Richard Nixon. Other actors discuss his reputation:

Then Vice-President Dick Cheney steps forward: ‘I had other priorities in the sixties than military service.‘ An actor reads from a memo:

If the number of recordings and concert performances is any indication, the post-1960s Mahler boom was not just a passing fancy. Rather, the public has taken Mahler to their collective hearts, assigning him a stature virtually equal to that of the idolized masters of the symphony, Beethoven and Brahms, as their successor. During Mahler's lifetime few but he would have dreamed that his works would achieve such stature. It has been less than a full century since he died, and we are now witnessing what Mahler predicted: that his time has surely come.

Performances by Mahler and his followers

But it was not so when Mahler lived. Despite his celebrity as a conductor, when he tried to foster his own music the results were far from consistently successful. He did have the early encouragement and support of Richard Strauss, who was the first conductor other than Mahler to perform one of the symphonies, giving the First in Weimar in 1894 and the Second in Berlin in 1895.

Mahler premièred all of his orchestral works except the last three (Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth and the unfinished Tenth) to mixed reactions. As an operatic conductor he had no equal, but as a conductor of symphonic music it would appear that critical and public acclaim was more dearly sought and not always found. In the period c. 1890–1910, continental European audiences and critics measured every new symphonic work against their heroes, Beethoven and Brahms.

On 9 November 2006 previews of David Hare's new play, The Vertical Hour, began at the Music Box Theatre in New York. Directed by Sam Mendes, it starred Julianne Moore, best known for her work as a Hollywood actress (which includes the 2002 film The Hours, for which Hare wrote the screenplay), and British actor Bill Nighy (whose association with Hare's work extends back over twenty-five years to the television film Dreams of Leaving). Although the show was the tenth of Hare's to play on Broadway (and at one point, in the late 1990s, he had three running concurrently), it was the first to première there and the only new play in the autumn season. Mendes, shortly before the first performance, recalled Neil Simon's remark that 'previewing in New York is like having a gynaecological examination in Times Square'; Hare himself admitted that 'Absolutely nobody opens a play cold on Broadway. Broadway's meant to be a place you reach, not a place you begin. It will be the most nerve-racking time of my life.'

It is perhaps a general human habit to view the technological and the organic as opposites. It is certainly the case that the phrase ‘live electronic music’ strikes many a music fan as oxymoronic. Isn't the purpose of electronics to do things for us so we don't have to do them ‘live’ ourselves? To record, perfect and play back performances so we can listen while cycling stationarily? To facilitate the creation of inhumanly intricate compositions that spew themselves out of speakers at the touch of a button, instead of all that messy sliding about on strings? While there is no question that composers of tape music and computer music (and a fair number of pop music producers as well) have employed electronics to exactly these ends, electronic technology has another, and possibly more profound power: enabling new and volatile connections. Don't think Edison, think Alexander Graham Bell. Since the 1930s (well before the advent of tape) composers have been using this property of electronics to produce not just new sounds but fundamentally new approaches to organising the sonic world.

Pre-history

Electronic music has its pre-history in the age of steam. In 1897 Thaddeus Cahill patented the Telharmonium, a machine that weighed in at over two hundred tons and resembled a power station more than a musical instrument. It generated sine tones with dynamos, played from an organ-like keyboard. Cahill understood that electricity could provide not only sound but a means of distribution as well: the Telharmonium's sounds were carried over the telephone lines that were beginning to be laid in major cities, intended for playback through speaker systems in restaurants, hotel lobbies and homes of the rich. Cahill envisaged a subscription-based music service, not unlike that of the Muzak corporation thirty-seven years later, but unlike pre-recorded Muzak, the Telharmonium was an instrument that had to be played to be heard.

According to various sources, the compositions of Mahler's childhood and student years (up to 1880) were both numerous and generically diverse. In speculative ‘catalogues’, the well-documented abortive opera projects Herzog Ernst von Schwaben, Die Argonauten and Rübezahl are listed alongside less familiar or less credible references to four early symphonies, songs, song fragments, chamber and piano works (including the Polka mit einem Trauermarsch als Einleitung which Mahler ‘composed’ at the age of six or seven). That the vast majority of these ‘works’ have not survived is due partly to the fact that many, such as the piano pieces in ‘Wagnerian’ style which Mahler played in 1875 to his prospective piano professor Julius Epstein, were probably never notated. Of the remainder, including those works deriving from his three-year period of study at the Vienna Conservatoire (1875–8), nearly all either have been lost or were deliberately destroyed by the composer. According to Conservatoire records, Mahler won respectively a unanimous first prize for the ‘first movement of a quintet’ and a non-unanimous first prize for a ‘scherzo for piano quintet’ in the 1876 and 1878 composition competitions. Bauer-Lechner mentions a prize-winning piano suite and violin sonata, neither of which appears in Conservatoire records. According to Carl Hruby, Bruckner recalled a ‘symphonic movement’ replaced by an andante ‘sonata movement’ in an annual Conservatoire examination, while Richard Specht wrote of a prize-winning string quintet, Alma Mahler referred to ‘a movement of a quartet for a competition’, and Ludwig Karpath recounted that Mahler competed unsuccessfully in the Conservatoire's annual song competition (probably in either 1875–6 or 1876–7).

Monteverdi's appointment in 1613 as maestro di cappella of S. Marco, Venice, brought him financial security in a post that also allowed him a good deal of freedom to accept commissions elsewhere, both in and outside the city. His initial salary of three hundred ducats was raised by the Procurators of S. Marco to four hundred in August 1616,1 making him, in his own words

Monteverdi's reference here to his assistant choirmaster is a reminder that he was not alone in shouldering the responsibilities of providing music for S. Marco. He inherited, and was later able to appoint, assistants who were not only performers, but also able composers of sacred music – Marc'Antonio Negri (singer and assistant choirmaster from 1612), Alessandro Grandi (singer from 1617, assistant choirmaster from 1620) and Giovanni Rovetta (singer from 1623, assistant choirmaster from 1627).

In these two reports of performances of Vespers music by Monteverdi, separated by more than 350 years, there are striking resemblances between the things that each writer chose to mention and those they did not. Both are fascinated by the performing forces, singling out certain instruments for particular comment – names, numbers and unusual, even exotic, features. Each mentions the singers as well, but generically, not as individuals. There are hints at the skills of the musicians but neither writer chooses to focus on the music he heard in terms either of its content, structure, meaning or genre (sacred music), nor its relationship to the event at which it was heard – in the first case as part of a service in a church and in the second, a performance in a concert hall. Instead, they both engage with Monteverdi's music as something that happens, a visual as well as an aural experience for an audience focused on the performers, rather than with the music as ‘composition’ or sound object.