Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Reading Taruskin

In every music department across the country, it’s likely most faculty members have some story about Richard Taruskin. Maybe the story didn’t happen to them, but the story is told with relish nonetheless: perhaps it’s about how he makes his graduate students cry, or how belligerent he can be at conferences, or how he walks around the Berkeley campus talking to himself waving a finger in the air saying (accusatorially) “Ah, ah, ahhhh!” But let us hope there is also in every music department across the country someone who has read at least one volume of his recently-published “Oxford History of Western Music.” I have now read the two twentieth-century volumes, and – while Rodney Lister’s review in Tempo makes some pointed criticisms – I am much the wiser for both volumes.

I was anticipating Taruskin’s book to downplay analysis and emphasize political and social trends. This is not the case. The musical analysis in the OHWM is frequent, detailed, in-depth, and insightful. And not only does Taruskin turn his analytical eye on the usual suspects (Second Viennese School, Stravinsky): Ives, Richard Strauss, Arvo Pärt, Benjamin Britten, and Philip Glass are also some of the composers Taruskin deems worthy of close reading. But at the same time that Taruskin explains serial rotation technique and metric modulation, he makes clear the surprising ways in which compositional techniques can intersect with history and society. We learn how Webern and Stravinsky sympathized with fascism; how some (seemingly sympathetic) performers actually found John Cage’s indeterminacy to be oppressive; how Elliott Carter’s music was appropriated in Cold War ideological battles; how contemporary religiosity has helped the careers of composers like John Adams and Osvaldo Golijov. And yet for all the dirty laundry on display, I actually didn’t get the sense Taruskin personally disliked the music he was discussing. Taruskin may find the patronage behind some of the music (and much of the discussion surrounding it) suspect; but the music of Schoenberg, Babbitt, Carter, and other modernists seemingly inimical to Taruskin’s scholarly program is treated with an open appreciation for what it has to offer.

My only question for Taruskin and Oxford University Press is: who’s going to use this book? The discussion is far too dense for undergraduate survey classes, and the scope of the book is too broad for graduate seminars. For textbook purposes, the OHWM is very impractical. To my mind, this is a scholarly book written for other scholars. As these scholars will come to the book already with a decent knowledge of music history, Taruskin’s project seems to me at least as polemically motivated as it is pedagogically. As such, he has thrown down an enormous challenge to future scholars of music: let us hope their erudition, passion, and discipline will match Taruskin's, and that this book will be rigorously debated, read, and, one day, superseded.

posted by David Salvage 8/06/2006