ABSTRACT
Attuned to this volume’s theme of the ‘Critical Ear’, and in recognition of Peter Franklin’s special ‘sonological competence’ in the realm of musical modernisms, this essay is devoted to listening. Franklin has devoted much attention to the music of Gustav Mahler, who was also clearly a rather extraordinary listener, alternately irritated by unwanted noise in the rural retreats where he composed, and imaginatively sensitized to the timbral subtleties that could be coaxed from his urban orchestra. Permeating his compositional output are the audible traces not only of these kinds of experiences and sensitivities, but of a sonic imagination especially attuned to the capacity of hearing across distances. Insofar as a preoccupation with distance may be considered a Romantic trope, Mahler’s attachment to Romanticism positions him as an anachronistic and nostalgic listener out of sync with his contemporaries. And yet, the rise of telephonic and sound-recording technologies marks his era as one increasingly concerned with new possibilities for hearing spatially and temporally dislocated voices. From this perspective, sound at a distance is the sound not merely of a Romantic past, but of a Modernist present in which ‘schizophonic’ technologies attempt to fulfill desires of overcoming time and space.
