Musicology Commons^™

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 David Lewin’s unpublished 1959 analysis of that same piece (by his teacher) shows a very different approach; Lewin’s analysis is a vivid but rarely …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.

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.

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 …

Berlioz's Mysterious Amélie, Pascal Beyls, Peter Bloom

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

In September 1864, in a letter to his long-time confidante, the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Berlioz mentioned the name of the woman with whom, as he had earlier confided to the Princess, he had conducted a brief but passionate affair: “her name was Amélie.” Until now, the Berlioz scholars have been unable properly to identify this mysterious person. From other letters and documents, including Ernest Legouvé’s Soixante ans de souvenirs, we have known the approximate dates of the beginning and ending of the relationship. But only now, on the basis of the birth and death certificates of the woman and …

Revolutionary Alchemy: Incantation And Collage As Magical Methods In Rock Of The Countercultural Era, Jay Keister

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Magic held a special fascination for the post-war counterculture, a movement that valued music and art as tools of the imagination to counter what Theodore Roszak called the “technocracy” in which science was to blame for cultural disenchantment in the West. At a time when countercultural rhetoric was bolstering a newfound faith in the power of music to generate social change, rock music began to be conceived by many musicians and perceived by audiences as a kind of magic. This article considers music by the Beatles, the Doors, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and others to show how musicians …

Pedro António Avondano: Il Mondo Della Luna. Naxos 660487-88, 2021., Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The world-premiere recording of Il mondo della luna by Pedro António Avondano consists of a highly skillful and alert performance by Portuguese musicians, including singers well trained in Italian. The recitatives were rehearsed in an unusual way, with the singers first speaking the lines rather than singing them. The experiment will be judged variously by different observers. The reviewer dislikes the frequent clash in pitch between voice and instruments, especially at cadences. But others have hailed the recording unstintingly.

Thomas Schippers In Cincinnati: A Forgotten Episode In The Life Of A Conductor Renowned For Opera, Nancy Spada

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Thomas Schippers’s experience as a conductor of symphonic literature, for which he seems to have been quite overlooked and nearly forgotten, is related in this article in some detail. There are interesting facts concerning his work as Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra where he expounds on some of his ideas about conducting such an orchestra and describes certain innovative programs he produced during his tenure there. Several well-known performers who worked with him give their opinion or recount their experiences under his baton. In addition, two of his former conducting students share some fascinating details of what it …

Two Essays On Contemporary Music, Bálint András Varga

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

Bálint András Varga (1941–2019) was an advocate for and a keen critic of contemporary music, first on radio, and later as an acquisitions editor for both Editio Hungarica and Universal-Edition. He interviewed many musical figures and planned to interview visual artists before he died. His interlocutors were impressed with Varga’s insightful questions and frequently answered them much more comprehensively than they would ones from standard journalists. These two essays were intended to be published in Varga’s third book, From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir. The first, “What to Listen for in Music,” refers to Aaron Copland’s book of …

The Ossianic Maiden Colma In Compassionate View: Ferdinand Hiller’S “Colma’S Klage” (1873) And Vinzenz Lachner’S Die Klage Der Kolma (1874), James W. Porter

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

The widespread, positive reception of Ossianic poems in Germany and Austria inspired many musical settings from Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and perhaps also Schumann. Settings of the poetic narrative of Colma, which relates the anguish of a maiden discovering that her brother and her lover have slain each other in mortal combat, were composed by Zumsteeg, Reichardt, Schubert, and Weber. This essay examines two later settings composed in the 1870s by Ferdinand Hiller and Vinzenz Lachner. While the settings are undeniably effective in their use of common idioms of German composition in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, they are …

Romances For Voice And Guitar, Arranged By Hector Berlioz. Atma Classique Acd2 2800, 2020 [Review], Peter Bloom

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

‘Brillez, Astres Nouveaux!’ Arias And Other Excerpts From Eighteenth-Century French Operas By Rameau, Leclair, Boismortier, And Others. Aparte Cd Ap223, 2020 [Review], Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Ludwig Van Beethoven: Leonore. Harmonia Mundi 902414, 2019 [Review], Ralph P. Locke

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

A “Free Artist Of Color” In Late-Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue: The Life And Times Of Minette, Bernard Camier

Music & Musical Performance: An International Journal

This article sets forth, for the first time in detail, the life and career of Minette, who was the main female opera singer in Port-au-Prince at the end of the eighteenth century. The city was the capital of the thriving and wealthy French colony of Saint-Domingue (which, upon gaining independence in 1804, took the name Haïti). Theatrical activity in Port-au-Prince was comparable to what one could find in any large provincial city, and the success that Minette gained was all the more remarkable for her being categorized as colored (mestive). The details of Minette’s origins, life, and career …

Exploring The Past, Present, And Future Of Romanticism: Analyses With Brief Biographies Of Works Performed In A Senior Recital, Jordan Langberg Hastings

Honors Theses and Capstones

A melodic and harmonic analysis of four instrumental works performed in a senior recital is presented in this thesis with brief biographical outlines of each composer. Three of the works, Johann Wenzel Kalliwoda's Morceau de Salon, Edmund Rubbra's Sonata in C, and Robert Schumann's Three Romances are written for oboe and piano. The remaining piece, Paul Hindemith's English Horn Sonata, is written for English horn and piano. The author provides a detailed and methodical approach for understanding the functionality of each piece.