Issue 6 (February 2025)
Richard Taruskin (1945–2022):
A Memorial Colloquy
Edited by
Ronit Seter and Ralph P. Locke

Abstract

Richard Taruskin—the single most prominent and influential musicologist of the past half-century—passed away on July 1, 2022, at age 77. A year later, a group of scholars gathered to assess his legacy at the annual meeting of the Israeli Musicological Society. The present Colloquy includes most of those short essays, further revised, and adds several more that were written at the request of the editors by yet other scholars who knew Taruskin personally and/or have worked closely with his published writings.

The twelve authors—Michael Beckerman, Anna Dalos, Christopher H. Gibbs, Scott Gleason, Uri Golomb, David Josephson, Ralph P. Locke, Klára Móricz, Marina Ritzarev, Alon Schab, Ronit Seter, and Rose Rosengard Subotnik—grew up in five different countries (the USA, Canada, Russia, Hungary, and Israel), and several have lived and studied or worked in lands other than where they were born (e.g., Golomb and Schab in the British Isles, Josephson and Seter in the USA, and Ritzarev in Israel and the USA), adding further richness to the tapestry of views offered here. The authors also represent several different generations, beginning with Josephson and Subotnik, who knew Taruskin when he and they were all graduate students at Columbia.

This Memorial Colloquy opens with an Introduction by the co-editors and includes essays touching on some of the major themes in Taruskin’s lifework. These themes include his pathbreaking books and articles on Musorgsky, Stravinsky, and other Russian composers; his successful decades-long campaign (not least in newspaper articles) to clarify basic issues about the so-called “historically authentic” way of performing music from earlier eras; his insistence on the importance of placing music in its social, cultural, and political contexts; his use of direct and colorful language—and his use of his personal charisma and quickness in private and public situations—to stimulate debate; and his most astounding single achievement: the 6-volume Oxford History of Western Music. “The Ox,” as he humorously called it in correspondence and in print, continues, in part through its online edition to stimulate readers and thinkers around the world. Its core ideas are now being disseminated through the one-volume textbook that one of our contributors, Christopher Gibbs, made of it, with (as Gibbs explains) Taruskin’s blessing.

Taken together, these essays amount to a tribute that, as he would have wanted, involves much thoughtful critique rather than only pale or formulaic praise.