Document Type

Russia, Hungary, America, and More Mentorship

Abstract

Richard Taruskin’s contribution to Russian-music studies can profitably be viewed through a historiographic lens. A comparison of the Russian-Soviet and American schools of musicology shows that both were strongly influenced by the same source – the German fin-de-siècle tradition shaped by Hugo Riemann, Hermann Abert, Hermann Kretzschmar, and others. Brought to the United States by German scholars who fled the Nazis, this tradition was transmitted by Paul Henry Lang in his seminal book Music in Western Civilization (1941). On the Russian side, distorted by the ideologized and emphatically nationalistic doctrine of socialist imperialism, it was carefully preserved by those who managed to survive the era of Stalinist terror. When Lang’s book reached Moscow in post-Stalin late 1950s, and served as the basis for new textbooks, both American and Soviet students of Taruskin’s generation acquired a certain amount of common ground in the history of Western music. However, American and Russian approaches to studying Russian music differed. Until Taruskin came on the scene, the Russians led the way with their solid and well-documented approach. But it was often nationalistic and thus ignored 1) some important European influences on Russian music and 2) the legacy of Russian émigrés. Taruskin brought these two important bodies of knowledge into the history of Russian music. In this, he was aided by a comprehensive knowledge of the Russian language and also of Russian culture, history, and music, as well as the culture of the free world in the field of humanities. In the process he developed a very influential American school of Russian studies.