Grammar of expressive gestures in Gustav Mahler's First Symphony

The paper aims at sketching a theoretical framework for the discussion of music as object analysis. In doing this, it offers some eclectic premises such as Adorno’s incidental remarks on style, late Wittgenstein’s concept of grammar, Hatten’s definition of musical gesture, Kühl’s cognitivist approach to music, and Nietzsche’s claims for a genealogy of musical meaning. As a result, the paper defines grammar as a precondition for a vocabulary of expressive gestures whose formation depends on the composer’s concrete choices insofar these intentionally charge specific musical patterns with meaning. Relying on this definition, the paper proposes to deal with expressive gestures implemented by Mahler in his First Symphony through semantic correlations that arise from the shift between musical genres and discursive modalities.