Richard Taruskin

A couple of years ago I put up a post praising one of the greatest musicologists in history: Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875 - 1940). Musicology is quite a new profession, dating only from sometime in the late 18th century when the study of history became of great interest. There were a few predecessors like Charles Burney (1726 - 1814) who wrote a multi-volume history of music and, after extensive travels in Europe, an illuminating survey of the state of music on the continent. These are among the first of their kind in any language. Here is a portrait of Mr. Burney:

The other great musicologist of this first generation was the German Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749 - 1818) who, of course, criticized the work of Charles Burney. Here is an image (engraving or woodcut?) of Forkel:

Since then there have been hoards, hosts, armies of musicologists. Musicology is all study of music except performance and composition and it includes history, theory and whatever it is that those "new" musicologists are doing--queering the nuance or something. But I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. I mean, to praise Richard Taruskin.

Prof. Taruskin, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, is a musicologist like none other. As author of the Oxford History of Western Music, it is probably safe to say that he knows more about more music than anyone alive--or who has ever lived, for that matter. But that five-volume work of detailed scholarship, published in 2000, was about recounting music history and had to preserve a certain neutrality. If you really want to get a sense of the sheer critical power he wields, you need to read his essays on the ideologies, politics and out-and-out lies that are promulgated about music. We find these perspectives in his collections of essays such as Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance, where we find his magisterial puncturing of some of the pretensions of the early music movement or The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays where he explains why the informal ban on performing the music of Wagner in Israel is perfectly reasonable and how ideology in academic composition departments makes so many composers "useless". Here is a photo of Prof. Taruskin:

A good many people read Prof. Taruskin and find him boorish or neoconservative, and that was my reaction the first time I read him. But with more exposure (I have now read all of the Oxford History, two collections of essays and most of his monumental book on Stravinsky) I have come to realize that he simply describes things as he sees them and he sees them very clearly indeed. He is not an arrogant man, as many have claimed. While he knows a very great deal, I don't think he pretends to know absolutely everything! I was standing beside him at a musicology convention a number of years ago at a lecture being given by a Russian musicologist on modes in Russian music (one of Taruskin's specialties). The Russian musicologist (whose name I forget) was describing a particular mode that was used by Tchaikovsky and Prof. Taruskin asked for an example. Without hesitation the Russian said that you could find several examples in volume six of the complete works of Tchaikovsky and he mentioned some choral music and perhaps even a page number. You rarely see someone like Taruskin coming across some new information about music, but this was such an occasion and he simply nodded in acknowledgement. I think people sometimes find him arrogant because he does not hold back an instant to deflate a pomposity or errant ideology or simple lie about music and its history. And, heaven knows, there are lots of them!

So I have come to the conclusion that in the person of Richard Taruskin we have, not just the leading musicologist of our time and the greatest public intellectual writing about music, but one of the greatest scholars of music to have ever lived, the equal of Charles Burney or Donald Francis Tovey. I don't agree with everything he says--I think he exaggerates the influence of neo-classical tastes on the early music movement--but, given sufficient evidence, I am prepared to admit that he may be right even about that. But who is right and who is wrong is, in the final analysis less important than the methods and means used to reach a conclusion. Richard Taruskin exemplifies the highest standards of scholarship, analysis and fearless research into music. For this, I doubt we can honor him enough. You might want to pick up one of his books and have a read...

Prof. Taruskin started out as a performer and in the 70s and 80s played viola da gamba with the Aulos Ensemble. I used to own an LP of Josquin des Prez on which he was a performer, but sadly that is long since lost. Here is a performance on viol and lute of one of the pieces on that album, In te, domini, speravi:

Joseph Kerman has died

When I started this blog in 2011, I mentioned a few times that there were three very important writers on music that it was always worth your time to read. These were Charles Rosen, who passed away in 2012, Richard Taruskin, who is still with us and going strong, and Joseph Kerman who just died on March 17, 2014. Of course, all Norman Lebrecht can find to say about him is that he described Puccini's Tosca as a "shabby little shocker" in his book Opera and Drama. Makes me think I really should give that a read! But of course, Joseph Kerman is known for his many decades teaching musicology at UC Berkeley and for an exceptional book on The Beethoven Quartets that I have purchased a couple of times and refer to regularly. He also wrote an extremely fine book on Bach's keyboard fugues called The Art of Fugue that I also refer to regularly. This book really represents what a book on music can be. It is comprehensive and detailed and brilliantly revealing. It also comes with a CD containing not only performances of many of the works discussed but also COMPLETE SCORES in pdf format so that you can see exactly what he is talking about. Here is a sample page in which he is discussing a few measures in the C major fugue from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk 1:

This is the kind of writing on music that has no fear of talking about the details and in which no comment or opinion goes unsupported!

In complete contrast to the work of Joseph Kerman is the writing in a book on Sibelius I was reading yesterday as research for my upcoming posts on him. The book is called Jean Sibelius and His World and, save for one paper on his sketches, contains nothing but unsupported and often, in my view, unsupportable, baseless speculation in what I would call "new musicology lite style". In other words, just what you would get from not-terribly aware third-year undergraduates who have read some "new" musicology and not much else but have a lot of half-baked ideas to share with you. Shockingly, this book is published by Princeton University and the contributors are, many of them, actual professors of music at actual universities, though not very well-known ones.

In one paper, the author manages to avoid any discussion of the actual music in favor of long-winded musing over the significance of a comment Sibelius once made about how compositions are like butterflies, if you touch them the dust comes off and they are no longer so beautiful. Of course, Shostakovich made a similar observation once, with a different metaphor. Eating with a friend he commented that musicologists were like the cook in the kitchen. The chicken lays the eggs and we get to eat them when cooked, but the poor cook just cracks the eggs and scrambles them. In both cases, the observation is to the effect that musicology tends to be cold and distant analysis, which is not the ideal way to appreciate the beauty of music. But this writer takes off on a wild flight as follows:

Sibelius' butterfly metaphor fits the expressionist aesthetics of the fragility of individual utterance better than it does academic logic. This was combined with a readiness to deal with unlimited depths of sorrow and pain, and a naturalistic directness, alongside a gothic textural complexity.

Yes, hundreds of pages of this kind of writing! What's wrong with it is, it uses terms like "expressionist aesthetics" that are crying out for both explanation and examples. What do you mean by "expressionist aesthetics"? Do you even understand those words? Can you find me examples, musical examples in Sibelius' music that would illustrate this? What do you mean by the "fragility of individual utterance"? Is there some way in which Sibelius' individual utterance is more fragile than mine? Or yours? And how would you show this? And how will you illustrate or demonstrate his "readiness to deal with unlimited depths of sorrow and pain"? Apart from mentioning his alcoholism, of course. And where, in the music, did you get this idea? I won't even ask what you could mean by "gothic textural complexity" but, if you can't show it to me in the music, I ain't interested!

Don't people who write like this have editors any more? Or, better still, teachers who are willing to ask these kinds of questions? This book on Sibelius, I am afraid, is the opposite of useful. Instead of giving you actual information about Sibelius and his music, everything it says makes you less-informed, because your head is swimming with all this "gothic textural complexity" nonsense. You are literally stupider after reading.

Let's listen to the Symphony No. 2 of Sibelius to clear our heads. See if you can hear any "gothic textural complexity":

Sir Donald Francis Tovey

In these days when we have rather a different kind of musician being knighted, I'm thinking of Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Mick Jagger, it is worthwhile recalling when a musicologist could be honored in this way. Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875 - 1940) was perhaps the greatest English musicologist. Musicology could be defined as covering all study of music other than performance and composition. Both music historians and theorists are musicologists. In order to obtain your doctorate in musicology you normally have to sit exams that require a near-comprehensive knowledge of music.

Sir Donald Francis Tovey

There is the story of the Oxford don who, while traveling in Italy, was told about a statue of the Virgin Mary that wept tears at certain times of the year. He was taken to the alcove of the church where the statue stood and shown a small puddle of moisture at its base. Leaning down, he tested the liquid with his tongue and after a few moments thought stated very clearly: "bat urine!" It is this kind of astonishing expertise shown by the older generation of British intellectuals that I associate with Donald Francis Tovey. His red-jacketed Essays in Musical Analysis devoted to various genres used to be found in most bookstores. But now most of his writings are out of print. The essays began life as very knowledgeable program notes to his own concerts conducting the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh in the 1930s. I suppose I feel a certain kinship with him because I spend a certain amount of time writing program notes for two different concert series.

Tovey's career in musicology predates the current model. In his day musicology was not so much a career as a cultural calling. But now we have hoards of professional musicologists who are anything but broadly cultural and whose knowledge is narrowly specialized.

One of the best collections of his writings is available online here. Unfortunately all the musical examples are missing so sometimes you have to fill in the blanks. But still it is well-worth reading. I will  put some quotations below that seemed particularly interesting to me as I was browsing through the essays. Here is a passage in which he describes how the string quartet grew out of the street music of the mid-18th century:

Though all the important chamber music before Haydn was designed on the continuo hypothesis, it would be a mistake to suppose that Haydn started without experience of what could be done by instruments unsupported by keyboard harmony. Such experience was familiar to him in the music of the streets. Serenading was a favourite pastime, enjoyed as much by listeners as by players. One of Haydn's boyish practical jokes consisted in arranging for several serenade parties to perform different music in earshot of each other, to the annoyance, not only of a respectable neighbourhood, but of an adjoining police station. Serenade music consisted naturally of dance tunes, marches, and lyric ariosos.

Regarding Schubert:

Schubert's masters at the ... court-chapel choir-school, have been severely blamed for neglecting his education and allowing him to compose without restraint. One of these masters left on record the honest remark that when he tried to teach Schubert anything, he found the boy knew it already.

Regarding the very young Schubert's setting of "Gretchen am Spinnrade" from Goethe's Faust:

Gretchen am Spinnrade is a far more astonishing achievement for a boy of seventeen than Erlkonig. If, for the sake of argument, we summon up the naive impertinence to ask where this shy choir-boy, absorbed incessantly in writing and only just out of school, could have obtained the experience, not of Faust, but of the victim of Faust and Mephistopheles, the answer is not easily guessed; for Faust, though published, had not yet been presented on the stage. 

 Regarding tonality:

Music, which often combines the symmetry of architecture with the emotional range of drama, has the misfortune to be accurately describable only in technical terms peculiar to itself. Chiaroscuro, values, perspective, are experiences in the ordinary use of human eyes, apart from the art of painting which turns them to its own artistic purposes. Architectural concepts are deeply rooted in the minds of persons innocent of technical knowledge : the human being knows his own size, and the intellect of Macaulay is not severely taxed by the discovery that nothing could be more vile than a pyramid only thirty feet high. But with music a conception so elementary and vital to the art of Beethoven as classical tonality is
utterly unidentifiable by anybody without some practice in actually reading music...

If I could translate this somewhat Victorian English into a more modern form, Tovey is here pointing out that the basic concepts of architecture are fairly easily described, but not so the basic concepts of musical architecture: tonality. They can only be described with the music itself and with technical terms directly related to the music.

Let me end with a performance of that song by the seventeen year old Franz Schubert: "Gretchen am Spinnrade" sung by Kiri Te Kanawa accompanied by Richard Amner:

Perspectives

Different people look at music from different perspectives--this is a truism. But the details are interesting. Performers look at it from the point of view of "how do I play this?" and "how do I get the musical ideas across?" They are concerned with stuff like balancing voices so the melody isn't obscured, getting figuration even, finding just the right tempo and so on. This is as true of the soloist in a piano concerto as it is of the last-desk violist. The conductor has to figure out the piece as well, just on a slightly more abstract level. But he too is concerned with balance and tempo and with accompanying the soloist. The listener might not know the piece at all so is just taking it in, or she might know the piece very well and be comparing it with other performances, again with things like balance, tempo and precision being important factors.

But musicologists look at pieces differently. They see it perhaps from a historical perspective. As I mentioned with the Beethoven, they notice that he is stressing third relations in the 4th piano concerto. G major phrase answered with B major (a third above). Second movement in E minor, a third below. Last movement, which has to be in G major according to Classical style, starts in C major, which is a third below E minor. Musicologists and theorists know this is interesting because the Classical period stressed, not third relations, but fifth relations: G to D, not G to B. Fifth relations are clearer and stronger.  But Beethoven was more and more experimenting with the basic principles of Classical style. Incidentally, Charles Rosen has written a couple of books that are extremely intelligent discussions of just what Classical style was all about. I distinguished musicologists and theorists but officially all study of music except performance and composition is called 'musicology'. However in practice theorists tend to be the folks that analyze pieces in great detail, while musicologists look at them in an historical or social context. There is a lot of overlap, of course.

Composers look at things still differently. It is not just the case that they are always looking for something they can steal (after filing off the serial numbers), but there is some truth in that. Other composers are looking at the kinds of challenges the composer took on and how he solved them. As Bernstein once is reported to have said: "Bach, that pregnant syllable that causes performers to weep, composers to fall to their knees and that bores everyone else to tears." Bach, and Beethoven too, are the ones that composers (up until the rise of modernism) would be most amazed by because of the incredible focus and dynamicism of their music. Write an entire volume of fugues on a single theme (with variations)? You're kidding! And exhaust every contrapuntal possibility? Or write an entire symphony largely based on a four-note motif consisting of only two different notes? This is the kind of thing that most composers know is simply beyond them. Which is often why they end up throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the piece with predictable results.

Modernism made a serious break in this historical relationship. Beethoven in his Diabelli variations could look across the wide gulf in time to Bach's Goldberg variations and know that they were the main players in the big league. Even as late as Brahms this same sense of historical connection was there. But with the serialists, the futurists and even the neo-classicists (who mimicked the outward appearance only) there is little sense of this great tradition.

But let's listen to a couple of those pieces, that stick out of the stream of music history like great peaks or crags. Both pieces are in several clips on YouTube and I have only put up the first parts so you will have to search out the following ones. First Bach, the Goldberg Variations recorded by Glenn Gould in 1982:

Then Alfred Brendel playing Beethoven's Diabelli Variations: