Document Type

Bringing the Score to Life

Abstract

Richard Taruskin’s brilliant rhetoric sometimes led him to overly categorical generalizations. One notable example is his four-stage “genealogy of musical morals,” summarizing the history of music’s objectification as “art” through literacy, printing, the birth of transcendent and autonomous art, and recording. Similarly, Taruskin’s subtle bias against the British early music scene was often camouflaged under various generalized dichotomies such as “straight-style versus crooked-style.”

Taruskin’s views, initially seen in CD reviews and newspaper columns, gained enduring influence through their repackaging in Text and Act. This work also impacted John Butt’s Playing with History, where Taruskin played a key role in summarizing the historical-performance debate. Butt acknowledged that Taruskin’s work “made future debate possible and has entirely reformulated the issues concerned with the discussion of HIP.” It is intriguing to speculate on Taruskin’s potential reactions to recent developments, such as AI’s place in his “genealogy of musical morals.”

Problems identified by Taruskin in the 1980s manifest differently today. There is a reduced tension between musicologists and performers, but this separation exists nonetheless and is not always beneficial. A growing sentiment among new early-music practitioners advocates for renewed collaboration between musicologists and performers. As the trend toward training scholar-performers gains momentum, it may reintroduce historical tensions, highlighting the complex relationship between these two realms.