Border Listening: A Global Hermeneutics of Gustav Mahler and His Music

Abstract

This dissertation posits a praxis of border listening enunciated in Gustav Mahler’s music as an intercultural theory of listening through such topics as truth, ontology, translation, and affect. The praxis of border listening, in this dissertation, carries particular cultural valence. It operates under a regime of value afforded by the material borders and their geo- and socio-political implications between Hong Kong, mainland China, and primarily Western Europe and North America. Under such a regime of value, border listening can be conceived of as a particular performance of a global hermeneutics of Mahler and his music—and Western art music in general—that consists in a double overrepresentation of Chineseness and Westernness. This is, I argue, an auditory tactic that maximizes the freedoms of listening Hongkongers are given within our borders. Drawing on autoethnographic, philosophical, and postcolonial perspectives, the three chapters in the dissertation examine different moments at the border in which (dis)comfort in in-betweenness rubs against fear of border-crossing. Chapter 1 examines the border between fiction and history in interpreting Mahler and his music and that between two ontologies of self. Chapter 2 examines a translational war surrounding Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) between China and the West. Chapter 3 discusses the border of affects from an autoethnographic account of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Together they lay bare the ossified racial framework, analytical perspectives, and music theories with regard to the hermeneutic practice of Mahler’s music in the scholarly community. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how border listening redefines what it means, and what it takes, to interpret Mahler’s music and beyond in a performance of a global hermeneutics of music.