Mahler: Ideas & Insights: A symposium

Date and Time

• Saturday, May 16, 2026  10am - 4pm

Location

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Details

Mahler Scholars and MahlerFest Guest Artists offer talks on topics related to this season's theme, "Reinvention: Channeling Change into Creativity.".
This event is part of MahlerFest, held in Boulder from May 13-17 at various Boulder venues. This year, the 39th MahlerFest, celebrates “Reinvention: Channeling Change into Creativity”. Artistic Director Kenneth Woods (Director of the English Symphony) conducts the outstanding MahlerFest Orchestra, together with superb soloists and extraordinary ensembles.

Joseph Horowitz – author of the Mahlerfest play “The Mahlers in New York”
Joseph Horowitz is an American cultural historian who writes mainly about the institutional history of classical music in the United States. He is one of the most prominent and widely published writers on topics in American music and is a former music critic for the NYTimes.
He is credited with coining the phrase "post-classical music" to describe an emerging 21st-century musical landscape merging classical music with popular and non-Western genres.[2]
He has taught at the New England Conservatory, Colorado College, the Mannes School, the Manhattan School of Music, and SUNY-Purchase.
Also a composer, Horowitz turned the Scherzo of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony — a whirling waltz/scherzo — into Mahlerei, a sui generis concertino for bass trombone and chamber ensemble that has been performed at Mahlerfest.

Thomas Peattie - Saying Farewell: Musical Autobiography and the Curse of the Ninth
Thomas Peattie is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Mississippi. He holds degrees in composition and musicology from the University of Calgary and a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Harvard University. His most recent research explores the relationship between Romanticism and modernism with a particular focus on the music of Gustav Mahler and Luciano Berio.. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Gustav Mahler Research Center (Dobbiaco, Italy).

There is a superstition within classical music, dating back hundreds of years, known as the curse of the ninth. The superstition states that a composer’s ninth symphony is destined to be their last, with a number of composers dying either while writing their ninth, after completion, or before finishing a tenth.

Gustav Mahler, having seen his contemporaries lives taken too soon refused to title his ninth symphony by number, instead choosing to title it, Das Lied von der Erde(“The Song of the Earth”). His attempt to dodge the curse seemed successful. Dr. Peattie explores the origin of this myth.

Hilan Warshaw
Hilan Warshaw, violinist and conductor, is an Emmy Award-winning film director and writer. He has worked as video director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and produced and directed the forthcoming film "Mahler in New York".
John Covach - Fin-de-siècle Vienna and the Psychedelic Sixties: Sympathetic Resonances and Spiritual Aspirations
including Professor in the Humanities and Director of the University of Rochester Institute for Popular Music as well as Professor of Theory at the Eastman School of Music, he has performed and recorded both classical music and rock in North America and Europe.
He has appeared on BBC radio and televison, and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, Time.com, Foxnews.com. He has published academic articles on topics dealing with popular music, twelve-tone music, and the philosophy and aesthetics of music “What's That Sound?” An Introduction to Rock Music.