Some thoughts about the music I heard at Severance tonight with Dan and Melinda Perttu. At the pre-concert talk Roger Klein quoted critics who found Mahler’s music, particularly the Seventh Symphony, banal. As I listened this evening, I realized that really isn’t other music like Mahler’s by composers of his own time. It is banal, and that is what makes it significant. Mahler may have been writing the world within his symphonies, but his basic musical language is exactly that of the commonplace, the street, the Gypsy camp, the shtetl, the nursery, the cathedral, the bedroom, the privy. His point is that the meaning of life is in the living, in the filthy, disgusting, degrading living, and that by living for our best even among the worst, we achieve the transcendence that Mahler saw in the human condition. Mahler acknowledges that we live in a world where children die young and are warped by abuse (or even well-meaning parenting), wives cheat on their husbands (and vice versa), governments persecute minorities, musicians care for their beer more than the music they are rehearsing, and wars, famine, pestilence and the rest are all realities. By taking the songs of childhood, worship, the poor, the illiterate into his music, he points out that the solution is to live life all the same, that transcendence can come from the common, the ordinary, the plain, and, yes, from the banal.
Tags: Alan Gilbert, banality, Cleveland Orchestra, Mahler Symphony No. 7