ABSTRACT
This chapter examines four different approaches to Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony: John W. Osborne and Lillian Kennedy’s ‘An Empirical Validation of Schopenhauer’s Theory of Music Through Analysis of Listeners’ Experiences of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony’, Anthony Newcomb’s ‘Narrative Archetypes and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony’, Vera Micznik’s Mahler and the "Power of Genre" and Adorno’sMahler: A Musical Physiognomy. Osborne’s and Kennedy’s methodology is unusual in that they seek to employ the rigour of a scientific enquiry within the framework of a rather impressionistic view of music. Anthony Newcomb elaborates and employs just such a schema in his interpretive reading of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, although he refers to it as a ‘narrative archetype’. Micznik’s aim is to reveal the way in which the Ninth Symphony manipulates or uses genre or generic presuppositions. Adorno famously said in relation to Mahler that ‘to be sure, music does not want to narrate something; rather the composer wants to make music in the same way as one narrates’.
