ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in some detail the impact of scientific racism on Gustav Mahler's self-image, as marked in particular by feminizing figurations of the Jewish male body as incomplete, or pathological. Heinrich Schenker's insistence on the mediality of music, on the medium-specific operations of musical materials, then, is invariably accompanied in his texts by a rhetorical casting of the Other in music scholarship as an ignorant but dangerous rabble, crippled by their false collective consciousness. For Le Bon, crowds represent the worst of the metropolitan imagination, its most base and anonymizing appeal to la bêtise, nonsense. In the crowd, the individual succumbs to instinct and gives up that which he is able to 'control' in other contexts. There is no doubt that the reception of Heinrich Schenker is characterized by, amongst other things, its community-generating character, in striking contrast to Schenker's own Schreibensart.
