Das Eigene im Fremden

This study of “the self in the other” is the result of a search for far eastern influences in the work of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), and reveals a complex web of references to self and other in compositional, biographical and cultural-historical contexts. Mahler’s "Lied von der Erde" forms the starting point for an analytical journey through the whole of his creative work, enriched by excursions into the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna and to the Paris Exhibition of 1900.

In the course of the analysis compositional features such as heterophony, pentatonics, open cadences or the lack of a bass line condense into the central concept of diffusion. The book deciphers modern varieties of decentration and dehierarchisation of melodic associations and harmonic structures, and finally an altered perception of the course of time which is prefigured in much of the early work and, in "Das Lied von der Erde" finds ist culmination on the way to Mahler’s complex late style.