Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of the perceived roles and potential functions of music and art in environmental movements. I focus on Gustav Mahler, a composer historically associated with nature, as a case study of the relationship between nature and art in Austro-German Romanticism and early environmentalism. In the first chapter, I connect Mahler’s idea of nature as influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and Arthur Schopenhauer to the ideas and rhetoric of nineteenth-century environmentalists in Austria and Germany. This context serves as the background for my second chapter, in which I analyze Mahler’s Seventh Symphony through an ecocritical lens. I build on the interpretation of Mahler’s music as a critical discourse on fraught relationships between humans and the natural world, focusing on musical evocations of animals and natural environments. In the third chapter, I foreground my positionality in a critical approach to a current trend in Mahler’s reception: an attribution of his works with environmentalist capacity. I employ the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to formulate my identification of hyper-anthropocentrism as a manifestation of the fear and domination of nature in contemporary eco-politics.

Committee Chair

Alexander Stefaniak

Committee Members

Caroline Kita, Todd Decker

Degree

Master of Arts (AM/MA)

Author's Department

Music

Author's School

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

Summer 8-2024

Language

English (en)

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