MahlerвЂ™s is built around a dominant pedal of A (the key of the movement is D major). BeethovenвЂ™s opening is built around a tonic pedal of B flat.

However, MahlerвЂ™s beginning is based on a descending sequence of fourths, where BeethovenвЂ™s is built in 3rds. The opening of his First Symphony is so obviously similar to the opening of Beethoven 4, that you canвЂ™t help but think Mahler is somehow directing our attention towards something in the earlier piece. In fact, Mahler began his entire symphonic voyage with a shout-out. Where a quote is often something you donвЂ™t notice for ages then discover to be identical to something in an earlier work, a shout-out makes you immediately think of the earlier work (assuming youвЂ™ve heard it), but the more you look at it, the more you realize that it is different. On the other hand, a shout-out (I suppose you could call it a reference or an allusion, but itвЂ™s less fun to do so) usually changes the original material in some relatively significant way, but tries to make the newly derived material sound as obviously like the original as possible. Shostakovich is the great quoter of the 20 th c.- itвЂ™s taken decades for some of those quotes to be detected, they are so cleverly hidden. Beethoven was not a particularly prolific quoter, but he used quotation with grate panache, ranging from hilarious quotes of folksongs to sombre references to Bach, but you never sense him calling attention to his predecessors. When Beethoven quotes the St Matthew Passion at the end of the Storm movement of his 6 th Symphony, it doesnвЂ™t sound like Bach- it is so integrated into the fabric of the work that it lurks there like a secret message from the composer to be discovered at some later date. A quote, or even a reference, works by keeping a musical idea from another, earlier work intact, but often depends on encoding that material into the musical material of the new work in a way that is often not obvious.

The very opening of the symphony is one of the great examples ever of what I call a вЂњshout-out.вЂќДЄ musical shout-out is a cousin of the quotation, with subtle but important differences. MahlerвЂ™s 3 rd Symphony opens with something really, really, really big. If simple things lead to big questions, imagine what happens when one opens a score and observes something really, really big. вЂќ However, even the simplest observations quickly lead to more complicated questions, and very quickly, you are into tricky questions about notation, performance practice, instrumental styles of different countries and so on. At each step of the process, there are observations of a straightforward nature- for instance вЂњthese notes have dots and those donвЂ™t. ThatвЂ™s the life of an honest conductor (or any other performer) right there. What do you see in the score, why is it there, and what do you do with it? What do we do with knowledge weвЂ™ve gained in the first two steps? What is there in the score?ДЈ- Application. On its most basic level, what most musicians, musicologists and listeners call вЂњinterpretationвЂќ is, when done right, basically a 3 step process.ДЎ- Observation.

Gustav mahler symphony 3