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Taruskin’S Great Contributions And A Few Shortcomings, Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Among the most needed, and durable, features of Richard Taruskin’s life’s work was his consistent interpretation of music and music-making within and against their societal and cultural contexts. This stood in contrast to the positivistic methodologies that German, British, and American musicology valued in the 1960s–70s: instances of the latter include the making of reliable critical editions and, in a very different sense, various “the notes only” methods of music analysis.

The breadth of Taruskin’s vision and his command of musical and cultural history are apparent in the enormous “Nationalism” entry in the 2001 edition of Grove (now available at …

Transforming “The Ox”, Christopher Gibbs

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This reminiscence recounts my experience transforming Richard Taruskin’s six-volume The Oxford History of Western Music into a single-volume textbook. At Taruskin’s suggestion, I was approached in 2005 by Oxford University Press to see if I was interested in taking on the daunting task of drastically abridging, extensively reshaping, and judiciously augmenting his monumental history. I did so with practical considerations in mind: limitations on space, concrete pedagogical aims, and sharing his desire to tell a compelling story. I worked with editors of the accompanying anthologies and recordings to decide which compositions should receive particular attention and emphasis. In this article, …

Thoughts Upon Richard Taruskin’S Yahrzeit, Scott Gleason

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Teaching portions of Richard Taruskin’s The Oxford History of Western Music to non-music majors at Columbia University (in the early 2000s) offered special opportunities and challenges. Taruskin’s musical ethics, central to that book, are clearly embodied in his writings about John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer. The Princeton School of composer-theorists is a litmus test of Taruskin’s thinking: in particular, Taruskin’s emphasis on music criticism can aid in an analysis of Roger Sessions’s 1958 String Quintet. David Lewin’s unpublished 1959 analysis of that same piece (by his teacher) shows a very different approach; Lewin’s analysis is a vivid but rarely …

“Good For You!”: Remembering Richard Taruskin, Anna Dalos

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin was a major promoter of Eastern European music. His interest was also shaped by his personal contacts, particularly in Hungary, where he visited more frequently in his later years, presenting at conferences. He developed close relations with several representatives of Hungarian musicology, among them Katalin Komlós, László Somfai, László Vikárius, and Tibor Tallián. In addition to presenting conference keynote lectures, and later courses at the Doctoral School of the Liszt Academy of Music, Taruskin also participated in the advisory board of the Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition, and became an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. …

Richard Taruskin And His Russian Music, Marina Ritzarev

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin’s contribution to Russian-music studies can profitably be viewed through a historiographic lens. A comparison of the Russian-Soviet and American schools of musicology shows that both were strongly influenced by the same source – the German fin-de-siècle tradition shaped by Hugo Riemann, Hermann Abert, Hermann Kretzschmar, and others. Brought to the United States by German scholars who fled the Nazis, this tradition was transmitted by Paul Henry Lang in his seminal book Music in Western Civilization (1941). On the Russian side, distorted by the ideologized and emphatically nationalistic doctrine of socialist imperialism, it was carefully preserved by those who …

Taruskin’S Dichotomies: Beyond Text And Act, Alon Schab

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin’s brilliant rhetoric sometimes led him to overly categorical generalizations. One notable example is his four-stage “genealogy of musical morals,” summarizing the history of music’s objectification as “art” through literacy, printing, the birth of transcendent and autonomous art, and recording. Similarly, Taruskin’s subtle bias against the British early music scene was often camouflaged under various generalized dichotomies such as “straight-style versus crooked-style.”

Taruskin’s views, initially seen in CD reviews and newspaper columns, gained enduring influence through their repackaging in Text and Act. This work also impacted John Butt’s Playing with History, where Taruskin played a key role in summarizing …

Richard Taruskin: In Memoriam, Klára Móricz

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

What was it like to be a student of Richard Taruskin? What was the most important lesson his students learned from him? In her short memorial essay, the present author considers the imperative of intellectual independence—freedom from methods, schools, political or scholarly agendas—the most lasting lesson she learned from Taruskin.

Richard Taruskin And The Early Music Movement, Uri Golomb

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin’s writings on the Early Music Movement had a pivotal influence on debates surrounding the concept of historical authenticity in musical performance. Taruskin championed the thesis that historically-informed performance (HIP) is only tenuously connected to actual past practices, that “a specious veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modern style around” (as Taruskin wrote in a 1988 essay, reprinted in his seminal collection Text and Act). In arguing his case, he correctly diagnosed the practices and motivations of a major group of performers within the Early …

Richard Taruskin And The Art Of Judging Each Other, Michael Beckerman

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Combining personal reminiscence and reflections on a professional life as an academic, this essay deals with the challenges of maintaining personal friendships while judging each other's work with integrity and acuity. It is in the nature of our business that we are evaluated by our most brilliant and successful colleagues. In this case, because of Richard Taruskin’s honesty and his unsparing commitment to certain intellectual standards, the challenge was magnified.

Farewell To A Beloved Buddy, David Josephson

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

“You never know when it’s the last time.” For sixty years, from a chance meeting when we were undergraduates at Columbia until his last days, the incomparable Richard Taruskin gave me the great gift of his friendship. I never knew why, still don’t, but I reveled in every moment we shared. After I decamped for Brown ten years later, and he eventually for Berkeley, our meetings grew fewer and a cherished correspondence (those from its last months excerpted here) filled the gaps. COVID-19 put finis to our reunions. “The last time” would come and go with all too little warning, …

Richard Taruskin: Tender-Hearted Or Tough-Minded?, Rose Rosengard Subotnik

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Our tribute to Richard belongs with JFK’s tribute to Thomas Jefferson sitting alone at his dining room table. Relentless in argument with intellectual opponents, impatient with pieties past and present, gentle with colleagues in need, and unstintingly generous to students and junior colleagues, he encompassed so many poles in so many worlds that it will take us lifetimes to measure his stature and accomplishments. Recalling AMS/Oakland 1990, an exchange precipitated by my search for a copy of the Norton Critical Edition of the Symphonie Fantastique, Richard's take on Theory, and his paper "Shall We Change the Subject," I try to …

Introduction, Ronit Seter, Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Richard Taruskin—the single most prominent and influential musicologist of the past half-century—died on July 1, 2022 at age 77. This Colloquy consists of extended versions of papers presented on July 2, 2023, at the annual meeting of the Israeli Musicological Society, and additional essays by scholars who knew Taruskin personally. The essays engage in critical reflections on his personality, ethics, teaching philosophy, methodologies, and massive and skillful literary output. Moreover, they illuminate developments in musicology over the past fifty years, from its positivistic roots and its focus on Western canonical works to challenges from ethnomusicological practices, feminist theory, and anti-racism/colonialism.

Front Matter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Contributors To Issue 5

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

The Music For “Victory At Sea”: Richard Rodgers, Robert Russell Bennett, And The Making Of A Tv Masterpiece, By George J. Ferencz. Rochester: University Of Rochester Press, 2023 [Review]., Elizabeth A. Wells

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Beethoven The European, Edited By Malcolm Miller And William Kinderman. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023 [Review]., Jürgen Thym

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Beethoven The European, Edited By Malcolm Miller And William Kinderman. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023 [Review, German]., Jürgen Thym

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Maestro, Directed By Bradley Cooper. 2023., Elizabeth A. Wells

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Orthography, Jeremy Gill

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The myth of Pope Gregory I taking melodic dictation from a magical singing bird is the imaginative starting point of Western musicʼs love-hate relationship with the music notation systems it later developed. This essay traces that development through Thomas Tallis and J. S. Bach to the dichotomous modern examples of Brian Ferneyhough and Arvo Pärt. In it, I suggest that Western musicʼs eventual development hinged upon that earliest desire to document and codify melodies, answering Gregoryʼs contemporary Isidore of Seville, who lamented that “unless sounds are held by the memory of man, they perish, because they cannot be written down.”

Metric Expressivity: An Introduction, Felipe Avellar De Aquino

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This article discusses how meter and musical impulses can generate distinct character traits in music according to a performer’s interpretation of the metric notation. It is part of an ongoing research project focused on interpretative elements and using analytical as well as auto-ethnographical methods. This article includes analysis and comparisons of historical recordings contiguous to performance-focused analysis. It is based on the study of metric components, organizational structures, and metric-structuring elements and concepts developed by Edward T. Cone (1968), David Epstein (1995a, 1995b), Roy Howat (1995), Mine Doğantan-Dack (2012, 2014), and Nicholas Cook (2001). These writers’ thoughts are placed in …

Mozart’S Jewish Librettist: A Brief History Of A Poorly Kept Secret, Robert L. Marshall

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart’s three greatest Italian operas, was born a Jew, a fact rumored about during his lifetime but not definitively established until 1900. The treatment (or not) of Da Ponte’s Jewish origins as documented from his time to the present constitutes a history of concealment, rumor, discovery, denigration, and exploitation. Its nadir was reached during the Nazi period, its zenith most recently, as the poet, hitherto a secondary player in the Mozart biographies, has emerged as the colorful protagonist in substantial biographies of his own.

In Praise Of Simplicity: Marie Hinrichs’S Op. 1, Neun Gesänge, Stephen Rodgers

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

In a chapter from German Lieder in the Nineteenth Century (1996), Jürgen Thym describes the historiography of the German Lied as “a hike through the high-peak area of a mountain landscape where the trail along the ridge leads from one glorious peak to the next.” Beneath the high peaks of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf, he notes, are smaller peaks not reachable by trail. Thym clears paths through this unexplored landscape by surveying the Lieder of Carl Loewe, Fanny Hensel, Franz Liszt, Robert Franz, Clara Schumann, and Peter Cornelius. My essay extends one of these paths, exploring the songs of …

Indigenous Form, Innovative Harmony, And Ingenious Rhythm In Manuel De Falla’S “Aragonesa”, Richard E. Mueller

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The literature on the music of Manuel de Falla has called ample attention to the striking stylistic developments in Falla’s music of the 1920s. The familiar sound of Spain was replaced by the acerbic neo-classic idiom identified with the music of Stravinsky. The issue is complex. Falla’s new music continued to draw on Spanish resources and technical aspects of harmony and rhythm reflect continuities that can be traced back to the earliest works of Falla’s maturity, namely, the Cuatro piezas españolas (1909). The first of these pieces “Aragonesa” was composed largely in 1906, and before Falla re-located in Paris and …

Music, A Connected Art/Die Illusion Der Absoluten Musik: A Festschrift For Jürgen Thym On His 80th Birthday, Ed. Ulrich J. Blomann, David B. Levy, Ralph P. Locke, And Frieder Reininghaus. Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner, 2023 [Review], Sarah Clemmens Waltz

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Contributors To Issue 4

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

South End Shout: Boston’S Forgotten Music Scene In The Jazz Age, By Roger R. House. Ann Arbor: Lever Press, 2023. [Review], David Demsey

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Handsomeness: A Biography Of Thomas Schippers, By Nancy Spada. Foreword By Steven Monder. Irvine, Ca: Universal Publishers, 2023 [Review], George J. Ferencz

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Berlioz In Time: From Early Recognition To Lasting Renown, By Peter Bloom. Rochester, Ny: University Of Rochester Press, 2022 [Review], Trans. Ralph P. Locke., Matthieu Cailliez

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Mr Byrde Affirmes It To Be Truth, Kerry Mccarthy

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This essay briefly contemplates William Byrd’s 400th anniversary.

Berlioz In Time: From Early Recognition To Lasting Renown, By Peter Bloom. Rochester, Ny: University Of Rochester Press, 2022 [Review]., Matthieu Cailliez

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.