So many wonderful tunes has Bill Evans introduced me to. In a sense, he has been a deep educator to me, as to many others.

As I was listening to his interpretation of Some Other Time — which, incidentally, sounds so much like one of Bill Evans’ own compositions: Peace Piece — and here’s Bill Evans performing Some Other Time it with Tony Bennett — and here’s another interpretation w/Monica Zetterlund, in this one you can really hear the on-the-edge balancing act between tongue-in-cheek and seriousness (watch her expressions!) — I learned that this song was written by none other than Leonard Bernstein.

Leonard Bernstein, one of the great American conductors and music educators, was one of the champions of Mahler. He was recording cycles of Mahler symphonies before it was tradition. He was buried with the score to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. He essentially built a world-view of the 20th century with Mahler at its foundation.

As Bernstein explains, in Mahler’s music can be heard many, many extremes. I think that this is true of many classical music composers — certainly it is true also of Tchaikovsky and of Beethoven, and of Mozart and of Bach (though as we go back in time, the extremes are perhaps more subtle) — but in Mahler, this notion of extremes is itself taken to the extreme (though I must admit that approaching the end of the beautiful 2nd movement of Tchaikovksy’s 5th symphony, there is a terrible moment of “interruption”, which is an excellent example of this overall phenomenon in music).

In these Mahlerian extremes, there is some of the blissful peace of Some Other Time and Peace Piece. One can hear it in the 5th symphony’s Adagietto, which, though a respite, teeters on the brink of ambiguity, or in the 3rd movement of the Tragic 6th Symphony (which one musician I worked with described as an extreme version of the 5th’s Adagietto), or in the 4th symphony’s beautiful 3rd movement, or in parts of the finale of the 3rd symphony, which, though it ends in “classical music triumph”, contains some of the more tender and, one may almost say more “enlightened”, passages to be found in all of Mahler, or in the momentous 1st symphony finale, where it is interspersed as a passage of supreme respite; this momentous finale starts at 35:30 — I did not link to the exact time, because even the audio compressor kicks in because the symbol crash is deafeningly loud — the beautiful respite starts with the violins at ~38:40 — listen to those two sections and you can hear a succinct, almost embryonic example of the contrasting extremes that Bernstein describes in Mahler. As a larger example, consider all of the preceding examples in their context; specifically, for example, the 6th symphony’s respite amid the “tragedy” expressed in its final movement.

This interplay of extremes would appear again, and again, and again, throughout the symphonies. Moments of “triumph” would transform into moments of “anguish” and back again. As it is in the symphonies, so it is in real life. Though I cannot exactly hear it right now, in the past, when I was literally obsessed with this music, I had experienced an epiphany that one such striking example can be found in a motif which is heard in the massively triumphant 8th symphony finale — the 8th symphony an extreme in itself — calling for a gargantuan array of musicians, the definition of excess of Romanticism in music — this motif later returns in the 9th symphony finale at a… most difficult moment, before the final “acceptance” that Bernstein describes in the Harvard lecture — another reason by the way, that Mahler’s music is so powerful: it does not end on either a “triumph” or a “tragedy” — but rather on an “acceptance” (although he began to write a 10th, this 9th is his last completed symphony; still, the only completed movement of the 10th also ends on an “acceptance”, after some newly found anguish).

So and but this Some Other Time … this light Some Other Time, with its little poignant moments — it too can be understood against the backdrop of these extremes which had so much entered Bernstein.

I imagine Bill Evans had listened to Bernstein conduct Mahler.