Reflections on Gustav Mahler

There is certainly no shortage of well-researched books about Gustav Mahler.
However, missing from the shelves, are those that deal more directly with the creative, technical and esoteric aspects so deeply entrenched within everything he wrote that, even today, his huge role in determining the course of new music is barely acknowledged. The mindset of denial enshrines the bias that has persisted from Mahler's own time and has allowed him frequently to be summarily pigeon-holed as merely "one" of several " post-Romantic" composers, who extended the life of Romanticism beyond its limits. Mahler's refusal to abandon tonality and start over, seems often his most common-held musical "transgression,' stated gratuitously and without the benefit of examining the record in in order justify an erroneous position. However, Mahler's revolutionary ideas and techniques became a large part of the twentieth century's new music and sound. Although his junior contemporaries developed them in other directions, in Mahler's capable hands, they became a unique medium through which the universe seems to speak and radiate the spirit of man's place within it.