Yo, Yo, Yo!: Remediatizing Mahler

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 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 Durchwirkungcontinues, the female conductor film Tár and the biopic Maestro being two 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 and performative media formats. More recently introduced formats now offer alternative ‘horizons of expectations’ (Jauss 1970), not seldom resulting in intriguing webs of perceptive associations. In this transformation, Mahler’s music is recontextualized from absolute concert music to functional music in service of alternative media formats and narratives. I will discuss 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. By doing so, I will introduce four different strata of mediatizing.
Built upon a taxonomy previously developed to analyze the mediatized Wagner reception (Wennekes 2018), and referencing the Dutch Mahler reception too, this paper ultimately lands on a case study in which Mahler’s music is recontextualized in the sequested environment of the concert venue, as a format dubbed‘Symphonic Cinema’. The concept is introduced by 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 tell us, but it is, in fact, a feature film, loosely inspired by Mahler’s biography, and underscored by various movements from Mahler’s repertoire.

Period	23 Nov 2023
Held at	ICON - Musicology
Degree of Recognition	National