Richard Taruskin

Richard Filler Taruskin (born 2 April 1945) is an American musicologist and music critic who is among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation.[1] The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as musical analysis that combines sociological, cultural and political perspectives, has incited much discussion, debate and controversy.[2][3] He has written on a wide variety of topics, but central to his research is Russian music of the 18th century to present day.[4] Other subjects he engages with include the theory of performance, 15th-century music, 20th-century classical music, nationalism in music, the theory of modernism, and analysis.[4] He is best known for his monumental survey of Western classical music, the 6 volume Oxford History of Western Music.[5] In addition, he regularly writes music criticism for newspapers like The New York Times.[5]

Richard Taruskin
Taruskin in 2014
Born
Richard Filler Taruskin

(1945-04-02)2 April 1945
New York, New York, US
Academic background
Alma materColumbia University
Academic work
DisciplineRussian music
Institutions
Notable worksOxford History of Western Music

Early life and education

Born on 2 April 1945 in New York,[4] Taruskin was raised in a musical family; his mother was a piano teacher and father an amateur violinist.[2] He attended the High School of Music & Art, where he studied cello.[2] Taruskin received his B.A. magna cum laude (1965), M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. in historical musicology (1976) from Columbia University. As a choral conductor he directed the Columbia University Collegium Musicum. He played the viola da gamba with the Aulos Ensemble from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.[4][2]

Career

Taruskin's extensive 1996 study Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra shows that Igor Stravinsky drew more heavily on Russian folk material than has previously been recognized, and analyzes the historical trends that caused Stravinsky not to be forthcoming about some of these borrowings.

Taruskin has also written extensively for lay readers, including numerous articles in The New York Times, many of which have been collected in Text and Act (in which he is an influential critic of the premises of the "historically informed performance" movement in classical music), The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays, and On Russian Music. His writings have frequently taken up social, cultural, and political issues in connection with music—for example, the question of censorship. A specific instance was the debate over John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer.[6][n 1]

On the faculty of Columbia University until 1986, he moved to California as a professor of musicology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the Class of 1955 Chair. He retired from Berkeley at the end of 2014.

Awards and honors

Taruskin has received numerous awards and honors for his scholarship. He received the Noah Greenberg Prize (1978) from the American Musicological Society (AMS); the Alfred Einstein Award (1980) from the AMS; and the Dent Medal (1987) from the Royal Musical Association.[7] He received the Kinkeldey Prize from the AMS twice, in 1997 and 2006.[4] In 1998, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[8] The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers awarded him the Deems Taylor Award in 1988,[9] and later in 2006.[10] In 2017 he was the recipient of the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy (Music).[11][12]

Publications

Sources:[13][14]

Books
  • Taruskin, Richard (1981). Opera and Drama in Russia: As Preached and Practiced in the 1860s. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. ISBN 978-0-8357-1245-3. Republished in 1993, Rochester: University of Rochester Press
  • ——; Weiss, P., eds. (1984). Music in the Western World: A History in Documents. New York: G. Schirmer, Inc. ISBN 978-0-02-872900-8.
  • —— (1993). Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv18zhdkh. ISBN 978-0-691-01623-8. JSTOR j.ctv18zhdkh.
  • —— (1995). Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-535743-1.
  • —— (1996). Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra. Vol. 2 volumes. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-07099-8.
  • —— (1997). Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv15r5dmx. ISBN 978-0-691-01156-1. JSTOR j.ctv15r5dmx.
  • —— (2005). The Oxford History of Western Music. Vol. 6 volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • —— (2008). The Danger of Music And Other Anti-Utopian Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-26805-0.
  • —— (2008). On Russian Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-26806-7. JSTOR 10.1525/j.ctt1ppqnq.
  • ——; Karlinsky, Simon; Hughes, Robert P.; Koster, Thomas A., eds. (2013). Freedom from Violence and Lies: Essays on Russian Poetry and Music. Boston: Academic Studies Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1zxsk34. ISBN 978-1-61811-158-6. JSTOR j.ctt1zxsk34.
  • ——; Allanbrook, Wye Jamison; Smart, Mary Ann, eds. (2014). The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late Eighteenth-Century Music. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-27407-5.
  • —— (2016). Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press. doi:10.1525/j.ctt1dnncjs. ISBN 978-0-520-28809-6. JSTOR j.ctt1dnncjs.

Chapters
  • Taruskin, Richard (1982). "The Musicologist and the Performer". In Holoman, D. Kern; Palisca, Claude V. (eds.). Musicology in the 1980s: Methods, Goals, Opportunities. New York: Da Capo Press. pp. 107–117. ISBN 978-0-306-76188-1.
  • —— (1982). "'Little Star': an Etude in the Folk Style". In Brown, Malcolm Hamrick (ed.). Musorgsky, in Memoriam, 1881–1981. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. pp. 57–84. ISBN 978-0-8357-1295-8.
  • —— (1983). "Handel, Shakespeare, and Musorgksy: the Sources and Limits of Russian Musical Realism". Music and Language. Studies in the history of music. Vol. 1. New York: Broude Bros. pp. 247–268. ISBN 978-0-8450-7401-5.
  • —— (1984). ""The Present in the Past": Russian Opera and Russian Historiography, ca. 1870". In Brown, Malcolm Hamrick (ed.). Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. pp. 77–146. ISBN 978-0-8357-1295-8.
  • —— (1984). "The Rite Revisited: the Idea and the Sources of its Scenario". In Hatch, Christopher; Strainchamps, Edmond; Maniates, Maria Rika (eds.). Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 183–202. ISBN 978-0-393-01677-2.
  • —— (1985). "Serov and Musorgsky". In Brown, Malcolm Hamrick; Wiley, Roland John (eds.). Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for Gerald Abraham. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. pp. 139–161. ISBN 978-0-8357-1594-2.
  • —— (1986) [1982]. "From Subject to Style: Stravinsky and the Painters". In Pasler, Jann (ed.). Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 16–38. ISBN 978-0-520-05403-5.
  • —— (1987). "Stravinsky's "Rejoicing Discovery" and what it Meant: in Defense of his Notorious Text Setting". In Haimo, Ethan; Johnson, Paul (eds.). Stravinsky Retrospectives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 162–200. ISBN 978-0-8032-7301-6.
  • —— (1988). "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past". In Kenyon, Nicholas (ed.). Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 137–210. ISBN 978-0-19-816152-3.
  • —— (1995). "The Traditional Revisited: Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles as Russian Music". In Hatch, Christopher; Bernstein, David W. (eds.). Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past. Chicago: Chicago University Press. pp. 525–550. ISBN 978-0-226-31902-5.
  • —— (1995). "From Fairy Tale to Opera in Four Moves (Not so Simple)". In Bauman, Thomas; McClymonds, Marita Petzoldt (eds.). Opera and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 299–307. ISBN 978-0-521-46172-6.
  • —— (1995). "Public Lies and Unspeakable Truth: Interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony". In Fanning, David (ed.). Shostakovich Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 17–56. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511551406.002. ISBN 978-0-511-55140-6.

Articles

Notes
  1. (See, for example, “The Klinghoffer Controversy” in Thomas May, ed., The John Adams Reader (Amadeus Press, 2006), pp. 297–339; Taruskin’s original 2001 New York Times article is reprinted there and, with a lengthy postscript, in The Danger of Music.)

References
  1. Kosman, Joshua (31 May 2014). "UC music historian Richard Taruskin relishes provocateur role". SF Gate. Retrieved 24 September 2021.
  2. McBride, Jerry (2008). "Richard Taruskin". Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources. Archived from the original on 30 January 2021. Retrieved 24 September 2021.
  3. [[#CITEREFRichard_Taruskin_|_Kyoto_Prize|Richard Taruskin | Kyoto Prize]], "Achievement Digest".
  4. Morgan 2001.
  5. "Richard Taruskin and Classical Music: Good for the Jews". The Jewish Week. 17 February 2012. Retrieved 24 September 2021.
  6. Maddocks, Fiona (17 February 2017). "John Adams: 'Trump is a sociopath – there's no empathy, he's a manipulator'". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 September 2021.
  7. "Richard Taruskin". University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 24 September 2021.
  8. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-12-02.
  9. "30th Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Award Recipients". American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Retrieved 24 September 2021.
  10. "38th Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Award Recipients". American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Retrieved 24 September 2021.
  11. "Musicologist Richard Taruskin Wins Japanese 'Nobel'". The Forward. 21 June 2017. Retrieved 24 September 2021.
  12. [[#CITEREFRichard_Taruskin_|_Kyoto_Prize|Richard Taruskin | Kyoto Prize]].
  13. [[#CITEREFRichard_Taruskin_|_Kyoto_Prize|Richard Taruskin | Kyoto Prize]], Profile: Selected Publications.
  14. Morgan 2001, "Writings".

Sources

Further reading
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