In spite of Mahler's frequent extra-musical references, he was leery of assigning a specific "program" to his music. About the titles he originally gave the movements of his Third Symphony, he wrote: “Those titles were an attempt on my part to provide non-musicians with something to hold on to and with a signpost for the intellectual, or better, the expressive content of the various movements and for their relationships to each other and to the whole. That it didn’t work (as, in fact, it could never work) and that it led only to misinterpretations of the most horrendous sort became painfully clear all too quickly. It’s the same disaster that had overtaken me on previous and similar occasions, and now I have once and for all given up commenting, analyzing all such expediencies of whatever sort.”

In the Scherzo of the Third Symphony, Mahler uses the arresting sound of the postman's signal to transform our sense of time and space. Everything goes still, and as if in a daydream, we hear a gentle posthorn signal played from offstage. The high notes evoke the piercing cry of a yodeller in the mountains.

The lyrical interlude of the Third’s Scherzo begins as if fragments of Tyrolean or Bohemian melodies are drifting up from the posthorn player’s unconscious. But soon Mahler mischievously lets the daydreaming solo meander into something strangely close to a popular Spanish tune of the time, the Jota aragonesa.