Podcast Categories: Music History

The Embrace Everything podcast series is an exploration and celebration of the music of Gustav Mahler. Throughout his life Mahler insisted that music had to, literally, embrace everything. This makes his compositions unusually rich in what they offer both audience and musicians. It’s often delightfully quirky one moment and then deeply tragic the next. Mahler did not shy away from introducing the most low-brow, commonplace musical tune alongside the most radiantly sublime words in all of spiritual literature. Gustav Mahler meant what he said: music has to embrace everything.

Each season of the series explores a different Mahler symphony. The series already includes more than 100 interviews with leading conductors, music scholars, and orchestral musicians—all of whom have extensive first-hand experience with the music, offering an abundance of insights into just what makes Mahler’s music so unique. Additionally, comments from Mahler and his contemporaries are read by actors throughout the programs. Each episode explores how Mahler drew not just from the world of music but from the other arts, from the world of nature, and from life itself. Anything that attracted Mahler’s attention was liable to find its way into the music. How did he do this? That’s something each episode investigates.

Interviews thus far include members of the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the London Symphony Orchestra.

Embrace Everything has topped podcast charts around the world. The series reached #1 on the Apple Music Commentary, Music History, or Music charts in more than 25 countries and has won 15 international awards in the last three years.