‘Looking out fo r the Horizon The music of Gustav Mahler in the light of the theory of the aesthetic of reception by Hans Robert Jauss

• Authors: Bogumiła Mika
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

The theory of the aesthetic of reception proposed by Jauss in the field of literature can be applied to research into the reception of the music of Gustav Mahler. In creating his symphonies ‘with every means of accessible technique’, the composer achieved what might be described as a reinterpretation of the conception of selected genres. In this way he disturbed the traditional ‘horizon of expectations’ of the potential audience, and significantly distanced himself from it. The most important consequence of this was the lack of understanding of his music by a section of his contemporary audience. Mahler justified the rightness of his own creative intuition with the famous sentence ‘my time will come’. In her article the author presents the fundamental theses of Jauss’s aesthetic of reception relating to his understanding of the ‘horizon of expectations’. She also indicates the manner in which Mahler distanced himself from that ‘horizon’, and how in individual symphonies he contributed to the expansion and reinterpretation of conceptions of genres which had previously been based on knowledge shared by the composer and the listener.

Keywords

PL

Hans Robert Jauss; Gustav Mahler; musical reception; horizon of expectations; genre; symphony

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 13
• Pages: 189-202

Dates

published

2018-10-17

Contributors

author

Bogumiła Mika

• Ph.D., associate professor in the Institute of Music, and since 2009 also a Vice-dean at the Department of Fine Arts and Music of the University of Silesia in Cieszyn, Poland. She studied music theory and composition, she received her PhD from the University of Silesia as a music sociologist (1999), and her habilitation as a musicologist from Jagiellonian University, Cracow (2011). She is the author of three books (Critical connoisseur or naive consumer. Silesian music audiences at the end of the twentieth century, Katowice 2000; Music as a sign in the context of paradigmatic analysis, Lublin 2007; and Musical quotation in Polish art music o f 20th century. Contexts, facts, interpretations, Kraków 2008) and of more than forty articles on contemporary music and social aspects of music. She presented papers in many seminars and conferences, in USA (Yale; Notre-Dame, IN), France (Paris-Sorbonne), England (London, Canterbury), Italy (Roma - Tor Vergata), Finland (Helsinki, Imatra), German (Hannover, Schwerte) as well as in main Polish cities.