Music as “Minor Literature”: Musical Syntax and Form in Gustav Mahler’s Lied von der Erde

Abstract

In combining music theory and cultural studies, my dissertation explores the ways in which Gustav Mahler’s affiliation with a Jewish minority can be read into his musical work at the level of the musical structure. To this end, I devise a theoretical framework that combines Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of Minor Literature with current theories of musical form, and conduct a close reading of Das Lied von der Erde. As minor literature, Mahler’s work manifests the approach of a minority group that deploys the conventional language of the majority—major language—in unique and unconventional manners. In transposing this conceptual framework to a musical realm, I identify the historical construct of a German musical heritage as the major language, whose conventional behavior is elucidated by various Formenlehre approaches, especially by William Caplin’s theory of formal functions. I conduct formal analyses that reveal Mahler’s relation to the idioms of German music, and demonstrate how these idioms are transformed, undermined, and “deterritorialized.” Of all of Mahler’s symphonic works, Das Lied von der Erde is one of the most suitable for the conceptual framework of minor literature. In its generic behavior and formal layout, it reveals a highly ambiguous approach toward the distinctively German genre of the symphony. Through the lens of minor literature, my research reveals how this generic ambiguity is symptomatic of a much deeper tension, a tension that exists at the core of musical expression, within the musical language itself. My dissertation endeavors to identify the traces of Mahler’s socio-historical situation in the musical structures themselves and by doing so contributes to ongoing discussions in several fields. As an analytical work in music theory, it addresses an issue that is rarely considered in Mahler literature, namely the examination of musical syntax and rhetoric at the technical level of thematic, melodic, and harmonic structures. Likewise, by construing Mahler’s music as an embodiment of the dialectical existence of minorities—living as foreigners in their own land—this study approaches a familiar and relevant topic in Jewish and modern thought in an unfamiliar manner that is no less relevant.