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Topic: Richard Taruskin

	'The Oxford History of Western Music,' by Richard Taruskin (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Taruskin's writing style is partly his personality and partly his approach to music historiography, namely that the social framing should always be considered in any discussion of the art within.
		Taruskin is a brilliant man. He's also an apt, if mean-spirited and self-righteous, policeman for the field of musicology and an advocate for reform in that field, journalism and performance.
		Taruskin may mention (several times) that his purpose is to avoid reading history as a parade of ideas.
	www.post-gazette.com /pg/05030/449503.stm (1197 words)

	Taruskin
		Taruskin is aware of what it means to write a history: what conventions are involved, what distortions and limitations they introduce in order to deliver the kind of knowledge we seek; and as a pedagogue, he wants to talk about this, to get it on the table.
		Taruskin is knowing, he also a brilliant narrative strategist, which one has to be to write a history of virtually every important composer in even as many as 4000 pages.
		But Taruskin makes it clear at the outset that "a lot of famous music goes unmentioned in these pages," and that "inclusion and omission imply no judgment of value." He is not concerned with "coverage" but with writing "a true history," not an encyclopedia; and this requires making choices, many of them hard ones.
	www.positive-feedback.com /Issue18/Taruskin.htm (2357 words)

	[No title]
		Taruskin's main point was that, in passing off as "extramusical" many of the ballet-related ideas that accompanied The Rite's conception, scholars have "sanitized" the work, brushing aside its explosive character, concentrating instead on matters of unity, integration, and method.
		Taruskin's interpretation of Stravinsky's "form" seems pedestrian to me, as if the composer were referring to a detached and lifeless outline of some kind, such as that often associated with the sonata, and not to a dynamic, lived-through sense of timing and place, the musical idea as a rhythm of the whole.
		Taruskin's selection of two general textbooks on 20th-century music to demonstrate the "conventional wisdom" of The Rite and its analysis is bizarre; not only are those texts necessarily condensed and often derivative, but the more detailed, specialized literature on Stravinsky and The Rite is vast and readily available.
	www.societymusictheory.org /mto/issues/mto.95.1.5/mto.95.1.5.vdToorn.art (4097 words)

	Text and Act [by Richard Taruskin] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Taruskin's contention (his broader point in that book, Text and Act, as a whole) is that an overly objective fidelity to the score (and to formulaic performance practice in general) in the guise of being "historically informed performance practice" is the problem in modern taste.
		Taruskin's whole book is a collection of essays and annotations explaining that same point: that there is a difference between fidelity to a score (basically, worship of a piece of paper) and fidelity to musical process: that music is not captured completely, or even to a large percentage, in a piece of paper.
		Taruskin's writing cemented my resolve and commitment to spend five years of my life in graduate school (1989-94), exploring the issues he brought up: that is, personally I've found his writing both inspiring and apropos to doing "HIP" better than it was done in the 1970s and 1980s.
	www.bach-cantatas.com /Books/Book-Text&Act[Taruskin].htm (781 words)

	Taruskin's Letter to "Commentary"
		Taruskin to dismiss as "sketchy," "glancing," and "far from convincing" the detailed discussion by Ho and Feofanov of what he claims to be "the only issue of scholarly relevance" in the matter of Testimony.
		Taruskin's letter rests on one: he contends that the problem of the authenticity of Testimony cannot be settled until Volkov "comes clean," presumably meaning that any evidence short of a confession by Volkov of plagiarism is "hearsay," and thus irrelevant.
		Taruskin himself comes in for frequent and severe criticism, not least for his oft-quoted remark that the composer was "perhaps Soviet Russia's most loyal son"; in his introduction, for example, Vladimir Ashkenazy responds to this fantastic claim by suggesting that "this musicologist.
	www.geocities.com /kuala_bear/articles/Taruskin-Com.html (1887 words)

	Welcome to AJC! \| ajc.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Richard Taruskin's gigantic new "Oxford History of Western Music" --- six dictionary-sized volumes; 4,154 pages; 1.25 million words --- is one such polemical survey, and it's likely to become standard issue.
		Taruskin's once-heretical assessment of modern music and "historically informed" early music, to cite two loaded examples, used to spark debate in concert halls and in the halls of academia.
		Taruskin's timeline on what's behind us is thought-provoking, and his seamless explanations carry the power of persuasion --- making the case that his history is definitive for our time, albeit not for all time.
	www.ajc.com /sunday/content/epaper/editions/sunday/arts_144cd9f0569c421a001a.html (1111 words)

	Title (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Rather than reviewing Taruskin's distortions and errors in relation to Martino, per se, I want to focus on a few of the general principles that seem to fuel his rage--principles that permeate much of the public discussion of what might be called academic modernist music.
		I see Taruskin's attack as exemplifying a broader tendency: to demonize some composers or some body of music (that is usually called "modernist" or "academic") and then to blame the perpetrators for causing the problems of contemporary musical culture.
		Taruskin's attack on Martino, like his vilification of Babbitt, amounts to a denial of the variety of viable musical possibilities--this time, it seems, in the name of cognitive constraints rather than the debilitating effects of academic sequestration.
	academic.csuohio.edu /nmmusic/Brody.html (3836 words)

	Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Taruskin lets us see Stravinsky in a global context, as we would a continent from the space shuttle--but he also gives us a microscopic view of details that is nothing less than Proustian in its nuances and shadings.
		Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity.
		Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore.
	www.ucpress.edu /books/pages/5559.html (635 words)

	JS Online: Western music tome for this age
		Richard Taruskin's gigantic new "Oxford History of Western Music" by Richard Taruskin (Oxford University Press, $500) - six dictionary-size volumes; 4,154 pages; 1.25 million words - is one such polemical survey, and it's likely to become standard issue.
		Taruskin's thesis: No musician in the 20th century, not even the high-minded avant-gardists, could resist corrosive commercial or ideological exploitation.
		In that way, Taruskin is reminiscent of the late essayist and biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a prolific polymath with deep biases and a joy for confrontation.
	www.jsonline.com /enter/books/dec04/286461.asp?format=print (708 words)

	Music under Soviet rule: Debate/Question of Dissidence/2
		Taruskin's extremely serious charge -- that Shostakovich sought to ingratiate himself with the Soviet authorities, if not Stalin personally, by penning an operatic apologia for genocide in the Ukraine -- is founded on his assumption that, during the early 1930s, the young composer was "perhaps Soviet Russia's most loyal musical son".
		Taruskin here proposes three definitions of dissidence: (1) as an expression of "defiant ridicule"; (2) as an expression of public dissent or principled criticism; (3) as a phenomenon which began under Khrushchev.
		The 19th century intelligent, quite to the contrary of Richard Taruskin's concept, was a subversive who schemed to bring down the existing social structure and replace it with a new type of society (of a sort defined by whichever radical sect a given intelligent belonged to).
	www.siue.edu /~aho/musov/deb/qod2.html (3554 words)

	NewMusicBox
		Taruskin seldom makes qualitative judgments, but he still maintains something which has more participants than ever is fading, and that belies the obvious—yet somehow easily overlooked—truth.
		Richard Taruskin's vast new book—though erudite, engaging and suffused throughout with a mixture of brilliance and delirium—does not quite live up to its title.
		Taruskin shies from this faux-"progressive" approach, creating a narrative that is unafraid to leap around temporally, and which devotes whole essays to composers whose work he finds to be emblematic.
	www.newmusicbox.org /page.nmbx?id=70tp00 (3971 words)

	Richard Taruskin Monday Night Lecture
		Richard Taruskin, professor of music at the University of California Berkeley, asks, “Did Somebody Say Censorship?” on Monday, January 23, at 7:00 p.m.
		Taruskin, author of the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, will present musical works that have been altered in the course of their reception by composers, musicians and legal authorities.
		Taruskin is the recipient of an Albert Einstein Award and Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships as well as a host of awards, including the Kinkeldey Prize, the Dent Medal of Royal Musical Association (Great Britain), the Greenberg Prize and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award.
	www.marlboro.edu /news/pr/2005/12/19/taruskin_monday_night_lecture.html (386 words)

	MAGNUM OPUS / UC Berkeley professor tracks the entire history of Western music (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		That author is Richard Taruskin, a professor at UC Berkeley since 1987 and the most important and influential musical thinker of our day for nearly as long.
		Taruskin is careful to keep reminding his readers that although histories like his can only deal fully with the former, the latter should never be underestimated or overlooked.
		A second theme is Taruskin's insistence on the relevance of external history and politics to music, in opposition to the Romantic myth of art as somehow transcending these concerns.
	sfgate.com /cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/27/RVG6QBRCVK1.DTL (1040 words)

	Amazon.com: Defining Russia Musically: Books: Richard Taruskin (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Taruskin, the leading American Russian music scholar (Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, LJ 12/95), here collects 14 essays on Russian art music and Russianess in general, most based on lectures he gave in 1993 and 1994.
		Taruskin is this side of the scholarship that shuns the guild system of note to note musical analysis the kind the Schenkerian ideologies have spawned in academia today.
		Except that Taruskin works at another level of contemplation,in saying things as this music has an immediacy that is borne through lived experience, it is not premeditated music, the kind we find in the West with an obsession for global order and pitch configurations.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691070652?v=glance (1350 words)

	Modernism, Rhetoric and (De-)Personalisation in the Early Music Movement by Uri Golomb (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Taruskin cites in this context T. Hulme's distinction (published in 1924) between vitalist art - which imitates the "forms and movements found in nature" - and geometric art, which relied on "abstraction" and on "something fixed and necessary", as opposed to the fluidity characteristic of vitalist art (quoted in Taruskin: 109-110).
		Taruskin (114) cites Stravinsky's demand for "true solidity", and describes it as arising from "the rage against flux and impermanence, the same refuge in fixity and necessity, the same fear of melting into air" that lay behind Hulme's aesthetic ideology.
		Taruskin argues that the traditional approach to performance construes intentions "internally" [...] and sees their realization in terms of "effect" of a performance, while the latter [authentistic] construes in terms of empirically ascertainable - and hence, though tacitly, external - facts, and sees their realization in terms of sound.
	homepages.kdsi.net /~sherman/golomb1.htm (4008 words)

	Amazon.com: Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra: Books: Richard Taruskin (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Richard Taruskin demonstrates Stravinsky's place in the specific cultural traditions of his homeland, pulling together with impressive intellectual breadth the influences of Russian music, art, literature, folklore, religious liturgy, and more.
		Taruskin's scholarship is of the highest quality, his knowledge of Russian music awe-inspiring, and the revelations he uncovers simply by being a Russian-speaker investigating the sources first-hand make this book a watershed in the way we think about Stravinsky.
		Taruskin's 2 volume set into Stravinsky's "Russian" period is still the MOST comprehensive investigation for those wanting a more discernible picture of the gestation of works from that period, including the Firebird, Petrushka, the Rite and Les Noces.
	www.amazon.com /exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520070992?v=glance (1289 words)

	The Early Music Movement from Within and from Without [by Uri Golomb] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Richard Taruskin is among the most prominent musicologists in the United States.
		Taruskin devotes much of his book to discussing this literature, and is very adept in revealing the philosophical premises implicit in ostensibly practical arguments presented within it.
		Taruskin employs a rich, literary language coupled with a sharp-edged, provocative style, which conveys his message with clarity and bite.
	www.bach-cantatas.com /Books/Book-Authentic[Golomb].htm (2022 words)

	NPR : History of Western Music
		In the new Oxford History of Western Music, musicologist Richard Taruskin explores the music of Europe and America from the rise of musical notation in the eighth century to the beginning of the 21st.
		Richard Taruskin, discusses the divergent paths of these three men.
		Richard Taruskin begins our chronicle with the early music of the church.
	www.npr.org /templates/story/story.php?storyId=4206681 (381 words)

	Text and Act : Essays on Music and Performance (Richard Taruskin) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Taruskin's pique at such wannabes and also-rans as Christopher Hogwood gives voice to a generation of music fans frustrated by amateurish and superficial performances of Baroque music, much of them coming from London and Boston.
		Taruskin should be lauded continually for pulling back the veil of "authenticity," revealing the blatant falsehoods behind most of what is produced by the so-called Historically Informed movement.
		Lastly, Taruskin's broad perspective offers a rounded view of the standard repertoire and their composers which does well to fill in the gaps left by both "authentic" and "mainstream" musicians who tend to look at repertoire on a case-by-case basis and make musical decisions based on selective scholarship.
	software.justwilliams.com /us/product/0195094581.htm (1054 words)

	Oxford University Press: The Oxford History of Western Music: Richard Taruskin
		Taking a critical perspective that challenges the received wisdom of the field, Richard Taruskin sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world affairs and cultural history.
		Taruskin combines an emphasis on structure and form with a discussion of relevant theoretical concepts in each age, to illustrate how the music itself works, and how contemporaries heard and understood it.
		Unlike earlier surveys, Taruskin provides greater attention to the full range of 20th century music, including American music as part of the mainstream tradition of western music, women in music, and popular musics.
	www.oup.com /us/catalog/24303/subject/Music/~~/cHI9MTAmcGY9MCZzcz1wdWJkYXRlLmRlc2Mmc2Y9bmV3cmVjZW50JnNkPWFzYyZ2aWV3PXVzYSZjaT0wMTk1MTY5Nzk0 (563 words)

	Taruskin, R.: Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays.
		The world-renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin has devoted much of his career to helping listeners appreciate Russian and Soviet music in new and sometimes controversial ways.
		Taruskin begins by showing how enlightened aristocrats, reactionary romantics, and the theorists and victims of totalitarianism have variously fashioned their vision of Russian society in musical terms.
		"Taruskin's hallmarks are evident throughout: research of almost astonishing breadth, impatience with facile views and those who propound them, and contempt for formalist modes of analysis that ignore the extramusical.
	www.pupress.princeton.edu /titles/6039.html (549 words)

	Music under Soviet rule: Chronology of the Debate (III)
		Richard Taruskin, a joyously contentious music historian, rose from the audience to defend his belief that the composer was 'perhaps Soviet Russia's most loyal musical son'." (In fact, Taruskin stated that his "loyal son" phrase was meant ironically.)
		The approval expressed on her book's dust-jacket by Richard Taruskin and Malcolm Hamrick Brown reveals a major academic scandal: endorsement of a false methodology from the leading figures at America's two main centres for the study of Russian and Soviet music.
		Richard Taruskin -- in any other circumstance willing to push the case for irreducible subjectivity to absurdity -- is, it transpires, willing to describe Shostakovich: A Life as "a reliable book to consult for the facts of [the composer's] life".
	www.siue.edu /~aho/musov/deb/dchron3.html (5542 words)

	PlaybillArts: News: Richard Taruskin Publishes Massive History of Music
		The work, in five volumes plus an index, is an opinionated narrative of music from the 8th century (when music began to be written down) to the present, describing the development of the art form as the result of cultural, economic, social, even nationalistic factors.
		Taruskin believes that such context dictated compositional choices—in many cases to a far greater extent than previously thought.
		Taruskin, a former early-music performer and current professor of musicology at University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Music in the Western World: A History in Documents and Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions.
	www.playbillarts.com /news/article/966.html (441 words)

	In Brief: The History of Music (washingtonpost.com)
		Richard Taruskin's vast new book -- though erudite, engaging and suffused throughout with a mixture of brilliance and delirium -- does not quite live up to its title.
		Taruskin is a Russophile, and his chapters on the works of Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are exemplary.
		Perhaps because so little documentation has survived, Taruskin gleans facts and impressions from visual art, architecture and history books, and pieces together a consistently engrossing narrative that may be the best general introduction to what is still terra incognita for many listeners: He makes one hunger to hear this music now.
	www.washingtonpost.com /wp-dyn/articles/A11895-2004Nov25.html (588 words)

	Taruskin, Richard - Text and Act Books at Real Groovy New Zealand (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-04)
		Gathers together for the first time Taruskin's influential and insightful essays and articles on musical performance practice written over the past decade.
		Yet far from impugning the movement's claim to authenticity, Taruskin argues that as the only truly contemporary performance practice, "early music" is authentic in a much more profound and relevant sense than a mere historical verisimilitude could ever be.
		Bringing his considerable skills as a scholar and a performer to bear on the situation, Taruskin's essays, ranging from theoretical speculation to practical criticism, cover a repertory that includes Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky.
	www.realgroovy.co.nz /books/isbn/0195094581 (551 words)

	Baylor University \|\| Public Relations \|\| News
		Richard Taruskin, one of the world's foremost authorities on composer Igor Stravinsky and the history of Russian music, will present two lectures Nov. 13-14 at Baylor University as part of the School of Music's Lyceum Series.
		Taruskin holds a doctorate in historical musicology from Columbia University, and he has taught at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California at Berkeley.
		These two lectures by Richard Taruskin are free and open to the public.
	www.baylor.edu /pr/news.php?action=story&story=1988 (278 words)

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