Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:54am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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20th Century Historiographies Session Chair: Amanda Hsieh, Durham University | |
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Reclaiming Mahler in the 1950s; or, the Aesthetic Politics of the Mahler article in MGG Clark University The reception of the music of Gustav Mahler has gone through a long and complex series of phases. Some chapters in this story are familiar: the critical resistance, often tinged by antisemitism, his symphonies faced when they were new; the suppression of his music during the Nazi era; and the enthusiastic “Mahler boom” of the 1960s and 1970s. Other important episodes, however, remain understudied. Among these is a moment in the postwar reconstruction of Mahler’s reputation that may appear minor but is in fact rich in implications, namely the commissioning, editing and replacement of the article on Mahler for the major postwar German music encyclopedia, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. The original author of the article, Erwin Ratz, and the editor of MGG, Friedrich Blume, approached Mahler from sharply divergent musical and cultural positions. Blume regarded Mahler not as a modernist visionary but rather as a composer who “saw it as his task to preserve the legacy of Anton Bruckner and to develop it further.” In contrast, Ratz, who unlike Blume had behaved with true honor during the Nazi period, deplored the lingering influence of musical values and scholarly attitudes that had flourished during that era. He regarded Mahler as "the most important German symphonist of our century" precisely because his music represented a "new confrontation with the problems of humanity.” Thus, Ratz felt it imperative to redeem Mahler’s reputation and redefine him as a decisively modern composer for the postwar era. In the end, the disagreement between Blume and Ratz proved insuperable and Ratz’s article was rejected in favor of one by Hans Redlich. Building on materials from the archives of the International Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft, including correspondence between Ratz and Blume and proofs of Ratz’s MGG article, this presentation argues that the disagreement between Ratz and Blume did more than shape a single encyclopedia entry. It was a formative moment in the reception of Mahler that articulated unresolved tensions in the cultural politics of music in the wake of Nazism and crystallized interpretive frameworks that continue to inform responses to Mahler’s music today. | |