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Number Nine Dream: for orchestra

Number Nine Dream

for orchestra

“It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away, as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter. "

– Arnold Schoenberg, Mahler obituary lecture, 1912

Although popularised as Mahler’s ‘farewell to life’, his Ninth Symphony prefigures many colouristic and textural developments of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including those of the so called Spectral School of composers, who employ acoustic theory and computer technology to coax new timbres, textures and shapes from the orchestra. In unwittingly anticipating these developments, it is as though Mahler is standing close enough to the ‘hereafter’ to foresee with peculiar clarity some of the music that was to follow him.

It is in this spirit that Number Nine Dream takes the first movement of the Ninth as its starting point on a journey to what lies beyond. Mahler’s original material is here transformed and developed using techniques adapted from both spectral music and from the computer music studio (using the IRCAM programmes Audiosculpt and OpenMusic) and combined with orchestrations similarly extracted from acoustic and electroacoustic sonic models.

This collision of twentieth century Romanticism and twenty-first century technology results is a kind of dreamlike state, in which we drift in and out of the consciousness of Mahler’s music, while experiencing a parallel universe of colour and timbre in which the Ninth can still be perceived subconsciously, from a distance – or perhaps through a veil, as if we have already passed beyond this supposedly impenetrable ‘limit’, and entered a new reality in which the limitations imposed by mortality are themselves no more than a dream.