Growing up in Washington DC, I rode a school bus every day past the intersection of Canal Road and Arizona Avenue, where a railroad bridge crosses overhead. For much of the nineteen-seventies, one of the bridge's pillars was emblazoned with the legend MAHLER GROOVES, next to a painting of a French horn. The image fascinated me, well before I had heard a note of Mahler's music: it was a cryptic message I yearned to decipher. I recounted this story in a 1995 New Yorker article, and received a lovely note from Dr. Stephen Chanock, of the National Cancer Institute, who corrected my account — I had remembered the slogan as "Mahler Lives" — and revealed that he and two other adolescent Mahlerites had executed the graffiti one summer day in 1972. Dr. Chanock was kind enough to enclose a MAHLER GROOVES bumper sticker, which I've treasured ever since; it's on the wall of my office, on top of my Bob Dylan poster. The bumper stickers were manufactured by the Mahler Society of Los Angeles, which was long under the leadership of William Malloch. One of the stickers fell into the hands of Leonard Bernstein, who affixed it to the first page of his score of the Mahler Sixth. The score resides proudly in the archives of the New York Philharmonic.
Update: Mahler still grooves.
