Taruskin has died

The New York Times has the obituary: Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Dies at 77

“He was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,” said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. “He knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.”

At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, Mr. Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces. His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of “music itself,” which, he wrote, represented “a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.”

You should read the whole thing, which is a pretty fair summary of his career. Right now I am exactly halfway through my third reading of his Oxford History of Western Music, likely the finest historical summation we are ever likely to see. On the occasion of his latest collection of essays, Cursed Questions, published in 2020, I wrote a post discussing some of the knotty issues presented. Richard Taruskin honored this blog by posting a comment which I treasure:

Hello Mr Townsend, and thanks at long last for reading me so seriously and commenting so seriously on what I've written. You are of course right: I love classical music and high art as much as anyone (even as much as you, I'll bet). My question is whether I am entitled by my love for it to regard myself as a morally superior person. I of course say no, and the piece on which you are commenting is my lengthy justification for my refusal to pat classical music lovers on the back. It's the sober academic version of that Musical Mystique piece from the New Republic a dozen years ago, about which people got rather exercised. But neither piece was an attack on the music or anyone's love for it.

All good wishes, Richard Taruskin

So I am forever disabused of the notion that listening to classical music makes you a better person. Though perhaps the jury is still out on whether playing it might help.

Our heartfelt thanks to Professor Taruskin for his lifelong commitment to the critical examination of classical music and its scholarship, a project that too few actually pursue.

UPDATE: There is a nice followup in the NYT by James Oestreich: Music’s Towering Intellectual, With an Appetite for Trouble