Dystopia and Music

Compositional techniques: from Beethoven to Mahler

The musical journey of any budding composer always passes through the same stages: the study of the masters Bach, Beethoven and… It all depends, of course, on the style of music you want to create.

In Eric Monin’s case, it was Gustav Mahler, whose three-volume biography by Henry-Louis de la Grange (over 3,000 pages) he read avidly at the age of 20. He was totally captivated by the composer’s life, his works, his compositional techniques, his demented orchestration… And, above all, by the symphonies as a whole, which undeniably tell the story of the composer’s life. So the writer decided to go the other way round: tell the story of his hero’s life and graft onto it a symphonic score that would reveal the twists and turns of his existence, his quest for Knowledge, his emotions and his loves, just as Mahler did during the last years of his life for Alma, his wife.

The symphony is thus structurally based on the novel, and faithfully follows the story and its inflections. The composer uses Richard Wagner’s leitmotif technique: a theme, a musical idea, a chord represents a character, an emotion, a place. You can get an overview of some of the main themes at the beginning of the work (Source painting) in the slideshow below: