Document Type

A Life's Work

Abstract

Among the most needed, and durable, features of Richard Taruskin’s life’s work was his consistent interpretation of music and music-making within and against their societal and cultural contexts. This stood in contrast to the positivistic methodologies that German, British, and American musicology valued in the 1960s–70s: instances of the latter include the making of reliable critical editions and, in a very different sense, various “the notes only” methods of music analysis.

The breadth of Taruskin’s vision and his command of musical and cultural history are apparent in the enormous “Nationalism” entry in the 2001 edition of Grove (now available at OxfordWesternMusic.com). The origin of that entry, in a suggestion from this article’s author to Grove editor Stanley Sadie, is here told for the first time.

Taruskin’s strongest writings include the article “Resisting the Ninth” (Beethoven’s) and books on Musorgsky and Russian music more broadly. His combination of passionate advocacy and writerly skill is apparent in his writings on the Bach cantatas, in his skewering of the claims of high modernists such as Elliott Carter, and in his identifying the trend of Historical Performance Practice (e.g., “authentic” instruments and a totally steady tempo) as a strongly modernist trend, closely analogous to the highly objective (non-emotive) neoclassicism of Stravinsky and the highly precise and literal performing style that arguably best suited Stravinsky’s music.

Taruskin’s 6-volume Oxford History of Western Music has been critiqued for omitting folk and popular musics as well as jazz. But critics have neglected to point out that OHWM also omits entire genres that rely closely on written scores, such as operetta, Broadway musicals, and music composed for films. These, no less than symphonies or operas, deserve to be discussed as part of the “Western literate tradition.” Taruskin should have addressed this inconsistency or limitation but never did.