Richard Taruskin's Envoi

This morning I finished reading Taruskin's last collection of essays. It ends in a rather personal way with his address on the occasion of winning the Kyoto Prize, the first musicologist to do so as previously they have only been given to composers and performers. The address is a wonderful way to end, not only the volume, but a blessed career in music. He recounts his life, outlining how choices and "affordances" (what we used to call opportunities or just chance) led him to the career that he had. How your life goes depends on ability, ambition and luck and stumbling across some Russian cousins in his early teens led Taruskin to become fluent in Russian. Later on, as a graduate student in musicology, this uniquely qualified him to do research into Russian music and we all know how that turned out! That gigantic Stravinsky monograph that no-one else could have written and that has to be the model for future composer studies.

Lots of other instances of providence aided him in developing writing skills, in dropping composition for musicology and dropping the cello for the viola da gamba. All these things led to his scholarship in areas that might otherwise have been neglected.

Let me just take a moment to rejoice a bit. Quite a while back I put up a post here that connected the "Private Language Argument" of Wittgenstein with the problems of hyper-abstract musical compositions such as those by Pierre Boulez. I was delighted to run across the same comparison being made in one of the essays here discussing contextualism.

It is a sorrowful shock to turn to the very last item in the book, the acknowledgements where we read just how devastatingly sudden his illness was. He was diagnosed with stage four esophageal cancer on May 25, 2022 and died thirty-eight days later on July 1.

Now I want to re-read a few things: Text and Act, his first collection of essays which I have on Kindle, but now I am getting in hard copy because I am convinced that the only way to read anything at all serious is by writing notes in the margins in pencil, something awkward to do with Kindle. After that I am going to re-read some of the other collections, then the final volume of the Oxford History (I recently re-read the first four) and then, oh yes, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, this time with pencil in hand...

I want to end with one of my envoi, a musical moment. The first time I saw the name of Richard Taruskin was on an LP of the music of Josquin des Prez recorded by a New York early music ensemble. He was playing viola da gamba. I lost that LP decades ago and it doesn't seem to be on YouTube, so this will have to do: