Richard Taruskin's Big Issues

These are questions or problems that he has wrestled with for decades and we find them taken up in various places in the Oxford History of Western Music as well as many published essays. These are the kinds of problems that he welcomes debating because

it is important that they go on, lest music--and when I say music, I always mean classical music--lapse into utter cultural irrelevance, as it seems to be doing in today's world. [Musical Lives and Times Examined, p. 2]

What are these questions? They are expressed in different ways in different places, but one big one is the social or political context of music which he always wanted to deal with, especially in the face of the romantic and modernist desire to wall music off from any contaminating elements for the sake of aesthetic autonomy. Music without context is essentially arid.

Another issue has to do with ethics and aesthetics. Both are important values, but independent of one another: "Good art can do evil. And of course bad art can do good." [op. cit. p. 9] He mentions preparing a list of compositions that are "musically excruciating but politically attractive" and it is all I can do to resist naming a composer or two myself. But I won't! In any case, he makes the point that it is important to allow, perhaps even arrange, collisions between our ethical and aesthetic sensibilities. In doing so, perhaps we can come to some dim comprehension of how you can listen to Schubert in the evening and go back to torturing prisoners in the morning.

Another one has to do with exoticism and authenticity and why it is that, for example, some singers adopted an untrained, vibratoless sound to sing early music on the grounds that if it sounds strange, it must be authentic. At around the same time, the early 60s, the lutenist Thomas Binkley was developing a performance practice for medieval monophonies based on North African vocal and instrumental techniques. This was very influential and why, to this day, a lot of recordings of the troubadour repertoire sound like Arab music. Again, if it sounds strange, it must be authentic. This discussion is part of Tariskin's long campaign against the marketing of early music as "historically authentic." He was of the opinion that we play Bach with crisp rhythms and articulations because it is to our modern taste and not necessarily because that is what Bach actually wanted or sounded like. I'm still wrestling with that one, but he makes some solid arguments.

Since these issues and debates were sustained over a few decades, they are starting to look like yesterday's problems. Taruskin never quite addressed current issues such as is classical music, heck, civilization itself, inherently racist? Similarly, is meritocracy racist? Can we think of some other recent questions that might come up? I think that he would advocate debating these kinds of questions, whatever they might be.

I want to put up a YouTube clip that I discovered through a Taruskin essay. This is a truly apocalyptic performance: Wilhelm Furtwangler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in their last concert before the end of World War II in January 1945. The piece is the last movement of Brahms' Symphony No. 1.

This is available because magnetic recording tape had been recently invented, in Germany. About the only concert that might be more apocalyptic would be if there was a performance of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony in that city while it was besieged by six Panzer Divisions for 900 days. There would be the sound of artillery bombardment in the background.