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Is existence itself created by song? That's an idea buried deeply in many cultures. In aboriginal Australian cultures it is literal and practical. Creatures don't actually exist until their song has been sung. Each landscape has its own song - which means it can be 'described' without words. In Narnia, Aslan sings the creatures into existence - one of the most powerful images from all seven books (chapters eight and nine in the Magician's Nephew). Mahler's musical world is infused with the emotional world of childhood literature - nascent ideas, not yet chopped down to blend into the garden of conformity and prejudice. I wonder......is there a special song that is the real me........maybe it has already been sung, and I missed it because I was too busy, or the adults were shouting too loud for me to hear. Anyways about, are these ideas just distant alien weirdness, or new age nonsense - or could they be glimpses of a reality that we all tune in to, even if only subliminally?

I feel a thought experiment is hovering nearby......I would urge you to take a few minutes, quieten your mind....... Now, imagine you have absolutely no words. There is no dictionary - you only have sounds - you are living in a time long before language evolved. In your mind, conjure up sounds to express your inner feelings as you sit in some particular situation, e.g. a summer evening by a river, in a wood in a storm, in a frost-gripped silent wood, by the sea, sitting with your sick child..... Don't sneer, saying that this is nursery stuff, or experimental theatre with Peter Brook, or some sort of psychotherapy group exercise. Those examples would be the least of it - but, far more, it is to attempt to free your soul from the restrictive armour of vocabulary in which it is trapped - a chance for your true self to throw off its clothes and feel the touch of the real world brushing against it. A child discovers the world before it develops the ability to squeeze feelings into word shaped formats. A young child discovers the world with its body, because it doesn't yet have words. And, to drive my point home, in case you haven't the inclination to do the thought experiment: In my day job as a performer, I know that we begin to communicate the moment we leap free of the tyranny of exact words or notes. As a listener, this is the point emotion is triggered, and you might be drawn in and feel excited - as a performer, this is the point at which you might find meaning.

Back to the symphony: Mahler's world wakes - nature rustles, the cuckoo calls, but doesn't seem sure which notes to sing (it gets its tune wrong), and other birds begin to shriek. His landscape fills up with images - comfortable familiar images from popular culture and children's literature - but then the images begin to leap up at you, like in Chagall paintings - out of perspective, in the wrong place. Frère Jacques is turned into a brooding depressive. Strangely, most nursery rhymes have origins in sinister events; Frère Jacques even had a history of being used to taunt Jews. Tea shop music, village bands, military music, and some Jewish klezmer music - all these wander around Mahler's soundscape. Why were the first audiences so shocked? In Mahler's time the word 'klezmer' wasn't used, they'd have just called it something like 'Yiddish racket'. Klezmer is full of yearning melismas and searing sobs. Who wanted to hear that racket after a nice Sunday lunch? Who wanted to be reminded of what it might feel like to be a Jew in those times? Every week during that period, from all over Eastern Europe, there must have been stories of the latest pogroms: Whole communities of Jews being set upon, driven out - and in the worst stories, children butchered in front of their parents, families burnt alive in their homes. How did it feel when you heard these stories - especially if you were a cosmopolitan, assimilated, middle class Jew? Here's a useful thought experiment......yes, another one: Assuming you're Scottish, how would you feel if you heard weekly stories of Scots being treated like this in Spain (just for example)? How would you feel on suddenly hearing a Scottish folk song emerging from a new composition, knowing how that very song would arouse hatred in many of the folk sitting with you at the concert? A song that is yours, that identifies you - the same song that could cause you to be lynched if you sung it in another town, not so far away. Familiar childlike tunes and images turn nightmarish. Familiar sounds and their meanings are distorted - and even more disconcerting, glimpses of deeper sinister truths peep from behind the hedge of your tidy garden, like eyes of wild animals. Recognition - here specifically, reconnection with familiar sounds - creates a feeling of safety, belonging, and identity - this is a process at the heart of musical appreciation and enjoyment. But the carpet is pulled from under you - you've been lured in by a sound that then seems to change its identity just as you recognise it. After all, what is your identity, if it is not built on memories, your own special songs, familiar things around you - those things from which you seek comfort and reassurance?

This sort of thinking and arty stuff might have been fashionably risqué in Vienna's small salons for art and literature, or in Freud's clinic.......but who wanted it in the large concert hall, the temple of the establishment, when you'd be all dressed in your finery and preening for attention? Nowadays we are familiar with scientific and psychological ideas that would have been alien weirdness to Mahler's audience. At that time, few people could have acknowledged that these ideas contained any reality - and they certainly didn't want this offensive stuff walked all over the cozy carpets of their ²µ±ð³¾Ã¼³Ù³ó±ô¾±³¦³ó°ì±ð¾±³Ù. Eventually Mahler was driven from the Vienna Opera by anti-Semitism, despite his conversion and assimilation. Some would argue that, in converting, he'd tried to bargain away his Jewish identity to Catholicism in order to get the job in the first place (Jews were banned from such jobs).......but the shop-keeper cheated him. Are we able to rewrite our song, the one we were born to sing? Like thousands of Jews on the escape trail to America, he had transformed the institution for which he had worked, which now ejected him. (Over in America, that very Jewish community now holds the balance of power in politics, and so, from the safety of the New World, it goes on to hold the balance of power in the Old World ...... does something remind you of the story of Joseph?) Did you hear Golijov's klezmer composition, Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind, that we played in the Fruit Market last year? Golijov's family came from Eastern Europe, and his music has a huge following......but it also sparks irritation and divisiveness......

I'm not suggesting that Mahler, or any other composers, intend this sort of interpretation. They plant their music in one place, in a particular cultural soil. It feeds from that soil, within the prevailing cultural climate. So called 'authentic' performances can't replicate any of that. The climate changes, the music is 'tried out' in other places, different reactions are triggered. Time moves on. Great music springs back to life in new places because its roots go deep into our shared experience - the plant needs to be allowed to flourish in its new place. And if you think I've meandered far too far off context - well, when I was young, the real fun of a country walk started only at the point we wandered away from the path. That's my refrain.