Most of the music of my early childhood and grade school years exists as one giant musical schmear in my mind. Equal parts Elvis, The Jackson 5, Freddie Fender, KISS, The Spinners, Rufus & Chaka Khan, and Merle Haggard. I was the weird kid that loved Soul Train, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and any variety show that featured musical artists.
I began playing electric guitar late in middle school and loved all of the rock guitar players of the time. But I can remember distinctly the first time that music of a stupifying beauty utterly enveloped me. In his 1985 book Seeds of Change, guitarist/songwriter Kerry Livgren wrote the following:
On a very different note, one of the most powerful musical experiences I ever had was in 1975 when I first heard Gustav Mahler’s greatest work, Symphony of a Thousand (Symphony No. 8; 1906-07). This monumental symphony, based on Goethe’s Faust, depicted the spiritual themes of judgment and redemption. I wept at the denouement when the mystical choir sang, “Look up, all creatures frail and contrite!…All things transitory are but parable; here insufficiency becomes fulfillment, here the indescribable is accomplished.”1
Livgren was one of my musical heroes and a Christian brother. If one of Livgren’s most powerful musical experiences was provided by a Mahler symphony, then I sure was going to hunt down a recording of that symphony and listen for myself. Our local library had just begun carrying compact discs for checkout (this was the mid-1980s) and they had the Georg Solti/Chicago Symphony recording of Mahler 8. It had this cover:
Nothing could have prepared me for the tidal wave of beauty that swept over me during the final moments of the piece. I was ready to love Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. After all, Kerry Livgren loved it. But it was miles beyond what I even knew to expect. Even on my extremely modest stereo, the beauty of Mahler’s music was like a tsunami. It was a watershed moment for me from which I have never recovered. I was still a guitar player that enjoyed rock, but music was so much more expansive after that.
While I love the Solti recording from a nostalgic standpoint, I am completely floored by a recent recording of Mahler 8 on the Hyperion label with the Deutscher Rundfunk Berlin & Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under the direction of Kent Nagano.
Kenneth Boa and Kerry Livgren, Seeds of Change (Westchester, Ill: Crossway Books, 1983), 57.