Autism and the Gustav Mahler Experience: How His Symphonies Can Change Your Life
In music folklore, there are moments that people often cite as life-changing. Moments where a person is never the same after a specific musical encounter. It could be hearing Jimi Hendrix play the Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. Or going to a Grateful Dead concert in the 1970’s and becoming a Deadhead. Or hearing Mahalia Jackson sing.
When people have these life-changing experiences, especially with musicians, composers, and artists, they are urged from within to reach across the space/time continuum and extend themselves into that person’s soul — for insight, inspiration, or even communion. When Kevin Costner was told to “go the distance” and rescue Terrence Mann (James Earl Jones) in Field of Dreams, an unconscious desire sprung from within Costner’s character that he wasn’t even aware of. He felt Terrance Mann in his soul but didn’t know why, the way many people feel about J.D. Salinger. They want to get to know him because his work speaks to people in profound and mysterious ways. It’s why Elvis is still alive in many people’s minds.
This is how I feel about Gustav Mahler. His music changed my life. But at the time, I didn’t know why.
Now I do.
The first time I heard him was probably in 2008 or 2009. I was starting to get into classical music. Even all these years later, I still don’t understand the musical language of classical music, with all its arpeggios, recapitulations, development sections, etc, in the same way that I thoroughly understand jazz or the blues. I don’t care how many Leonard Bernstein lectures I’ve seen and heard over the years explaining classical music to beginners; I still really don’t get it. But I know what speaks to me at an energetic, emotional level.
Mahler speaks the language of autism.
I remember what I was doing when I first heard Mahler. I was at Laguardia Airport in New York City, waiting to board a flight back to Detroit after attending a board of directors meeting for an autism organization. I had my first iPod (I know, I’m showing my age) out and was looking for something to listen to. I had a couple of hours of wait time to board my flight and saw a symphony that lasted around 80 minutes. It was Mahler’s second symphony. I expected breezy Mozartian-type music. I didn’t know a Mahler from a Bach. What I got instead was a philosophical statement. It was a world in itself — larger than life. I heard nature sounds, Klezmer Music, doubt, angst, despair, exaltation, glory, etc. Any human emotion in existence was somehow contained within this one symphony. “What the heck did I just listen to”?, I thought. Then, I had to compare him to other composers like him to see if this was just a “Mahler thing” or something all composers possessed. Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and even Shotstokovich all had some of the same qualities — music that oscillated in emotional intensity, etc. Shostakovich put coded messages within his music during the Soviet era and had very important things to say as a composer about life. But there was something different about Mahler. What was it?
I didn’t know it then, but it was Mahler speaking the language of autism. At least, that’s how my ears hear it.
What Is The Mahler Factor?
I don’t know.
Part of that is Mahler. He never actually gives his listeners answers. He just asks an endless series of questions in a million different repetitive ways; paradoxically, each reiteration is endlessly fascinating. But only partially satisfying. And that hunger, which can never be satisfied, is ironically part of what is enjoyable about Mahler’s music. He gives you a million things to think about and lets you sort it all out.
Mahler was a contradictory figure. He was born into a Jewish household with an abusive father and, during childhood, suffered the deaths of several siblings. Later on in life, to support himself financially and be accepted in the time and place he was living in, he converted to Catholicism. He was masking big time! Theorists hold to the belief he was a lifelong agnostic. This begs the question…how could this man write a symphony about resurrection when he might not have fully believed in God? Mahler leaves this for you to solve the riddle. It’s one of his many contradictions.
The deaths of his siblings haunted him for the rest of his life. His wife, Alma, cringed when he wrote an entire song cycle in 1904 about Songs On The Death of Children that contained a vast spectrum of oscillating emotions, characteristic of Mahler’s music. Alma couldn’t understand why Mahler would do this. They had children by this point in time. Why would he write about such terrible, even unthinkable things? He surely was tempting fate. As fate would have it, one of his daughters died three years later.
Mahler shows up on some lists identifying retrospective autistic figures of the past. But this diagnosis is far from definitive and very speculative. I can’t really say with any certainty Mahler was actually autistic. We can say with far more certainty that Mahler was the Van Gogh of classical music: He very likely had bipolar disorder and was thus neurodiverse.
Still, I don’t know. His music oozes something I can only describe as “autistic musicality.” Leonard Bernstein said…
But still I admit it’s a problem to be both a conductor and a composer; there never seems to be enough time and energy to be both things. I ought to know because I have the same problem myself, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m so sympathetic to Mahler: I understand his problem. It’s like being two different men locked up in the same body; one man is a conductor and the other a composer, and they’re both one fellow called Mahler (or Bernstein). It’s like being a double man. But with him, with Mahler, the problem was much worse even; he was a double man in every single part of his musical life. And today we’re going to try and get a picture in our minds of this double man, by listening to his music, and discovering how the battle between those two different Mahlers inside him made his music come out sounding the original way it does.
Most classical composers repeat their themes, develop them, and redevelop them even more. But Bernstein has an answer to that, too.
But then, of course, you’ll say, “Doesn’t every composer go from happy to sad and back again? I mean, it’s true of Mozart, isn’t it, and Bach and everyone?” Yes, but no composer goes quite so far in each direction, so happy and so sad. When Mahler is sad, it is a complete sadness; nothing can comfort him, it’s like a weeping child. And when he’s happy, he’s happy the way a child is — all the way. And that’s one of the keys to the Mahler puzzle: He is like a child; his feelings are extreme, exaggerated, like young people’s feelings. That’s another reason why it’s so especially right to have you come to his birthday celebration; I think young people can understand Mahler’s feelings even better than older ones. Once you understand that secret of his music — the voice of the child — you can really love his music.
So that’s the main secret about him. He was struggling all his life to recapture those pure, unmixed, overflowing emotions of childhood. I’m sure you’ve all had emotions like that, that filled-up feeling that nature sometimes makes you have, especially in the spring, when you almost want to cry because everything is so beautiful. Well, Mahler’s music is full of those feelings and full of the sounds of nature, like bird calls and hunting horns and forest murmurs — which are all part of his idea of beauty, childlike beauty. Here was this grown-up, very sophisticated, learned man, with children of his own and a heart full of struggles between the different voices fighting inside him, always trying to feel pure and innocent again, like a child. And that, too, is another one of those battles he had, the battle of the double man — half man, half child.
I can already hear readers accuse me of trying to infantilize Mahler to conform to an autism stereotype. No. What I am saying is he had extreme emotions that he couldn’t blunt, like many autistics, and it showed up in his music, much of these emotions invariably stemming from childhood trauma. Mahler did have a desire to return to childhood even as he remained an entirely self-determined and autonomous adult, and this is something autistic people sometimes experience. I have a first cousin on the autism spectrum who watches Nickelodeon and Disney, and I know that this is a phenomenon not unique to him based on my experience meeting fellow spectrumites.
Mahler endlessly repeated his musical ideas in different ways— does this sound like perseveration to you? He would insert a musical idea into a place where you would least expect it — does this sound like a non-sequitur? He would insert nature calls into many of his works — do you know any autistics who don’t love animals and nature? His work almost belies a certain kind of literalism as he takes what he hears into the real world and inserts it directly into music. Birds chirping, hammers coming down, military marches, trains, cowbells, Klezmer music he heard growing up — the list could go on and on. He could take many different kinds of music, see patterns between them that might possibly escape a neurotypical’s attention, and integrate them into a cohesive whole. If Mahler doesn’t answer the questions he probes, there is never any doubt about how he feels at any given time. In my opinion, no other composer expresses their emotions as profoundly as Mahler. I believe that composing helped with his emotional regulation in that he could take these extreme emotions that he might have had trouble naming and channel them directly into his music. Who knows, he might have written an entire symphony on alexithymia if he knew what it was in his day!
And then, there are all of the questions Mahler asked in his music — his endless curiosity and creativity. Sure, all the romantics probed the mysteries of life, death, alienation, and solitude. But Mahler did it in a remarkably autistic way. He loved to juxtapose the sacred and the profane side by side, almost as if he were conducting a science experiment to see what would happen. He would take grotesque melodies in his scherzos and make some humorous and somehow non-threatening. He probed, and probed, and probed and probed. And it all oozes autistic musicality to me.
And then there are his symphonies, all 10 of them (9 completed ones). Each one is entirely different from all the others. Each one takes contradictory positions. Each one has something unique to say. And each one of them is a universe in itself.
If you listen to Symphony №2, you might think that Mahler believes death is a glorious, exhilarating, and redemptive process. But try listening to Symphony 6, and Mahler seems to come to a very different, almost opposite conclusion about death. And yet again, Symphony 4 comes to another variation about how a child would view the afterlife. And then again, in Symphony 9, when Mahler was near the end of his life, the actual sounds of resignation entered his music. One thing is for sure: He returned to the same themes again and again and explored them until there was no longer any uncharted territory left. This sounds a lot like autistic musicality to me.
I am not a Mahler scholar. I am not even an expert on classical music. But I do know autism when I hear it.
If you ever feel like the world doesn’t make sense, try listening to Mahler. He’s struggling to make sense of it right along with you. He’s asking the same questions we autistics ask today. What is the meaning of it all? Why is life so hard that I have to pretend to be something I am not (think of Mahler’s conversion)? Why can’t I permanently find repose in nature where the social laws of the jungle don’t apply? Why is my emotional expression so extreme that I have to resort to a “special interest” to put how I am feeling into form?
You might find Mahler to be a pleasant companion when you need one.
