Description
Both Gustav Mahler’s symphonies and life story have figured in narrative fiction, film and the fine arts since his death in 1911. One need only mention certain clichés: Thomas Mann and Oskar Kokoschka, or for the cinematic medium: Ken Russell’s eponymous biopic Mahler and of course, Visconti’s unavoidable Death in Venice. To drop just a few of the most famous names associated with Mahler. These last-mentioned productions are time points of reference, as well as stumbling blocks within the rich domain of (re)mediatized Mahler reception, heatedly discussed in academic and public debates alike. Meanwhile, the cinematic Mahler Durchwirkung continues, the female conductor film Tár being one of the most recent examples.
This presentation will attempt, however, to look beyond and besides these highpoints of the specific cinematic Mahler reception by zooming in on alternative screen media formats. More recently introduced media formats now offer alternative ‘horizons of expectations’ , not seldom resulting in intriguing webs of perceptive associations. Mahler’s music is recontextualized from absolute concert music to functional music in service of alternative media formats and narratives. I employ the term mediatizing music for this process of representing music in other media formats, irregardless whether these alternative formats are considered ‘old’ or ‘new’ media (from scores to television), hypermedia, transparent media, and so on. By doing so, I value four different domains of mediatizing music.
Built upon a taxonomy previously developed to analyze the mediatized Wagner reception, this paper lands on a case study in which Mahler’s music is recontextualized in the sequested environment of the concert venue, format dubbed ‘Symphonic Cinema’. The concept is introduced by Dutch film maker Lucas van Woerkum (1982). As a present-day heir to Walt Disney, he ‘composes’ new footage to music from the classical canon. Van Woerkum’s film The Echo of Being (2020)—exclusively screened to interact with a live performing orchestra—is not based on the possible narrative the music may perhaps tell us, but is a feature film, inspired by Mahler’s biography and underscored by various movements from Mahler’s repertoire, seamlessly glued together.
| Period | 15 Sept 2023 |
|---|---|
| Held at | The Gustav Mahler Research Centre, Toblach: University of Innsbruck, Austria |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Gustav Mahker, film, remiating, mediatizing musiuc, Lucas van Woerkum