Home      Discussion      Topics      Dictionary      Almanac
Signup       Login
Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin

Overview
Richard Taruskin (born 1945) is an American musicologist, music historian, and critic who has written about the theory of performance, Russian music, fifteenth-century music, twentieth-century music, nationalism, the theory of modernism, and analysis. As a choral conductor he directed the Columbia University Collegium Musicum. He played the viol
Viol
The viol is any one of a family of bowed, fretted, stringed musical instruments developed in the mid-late 1400s and used primarily in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The family is related to and descends primarily from the Spanish vihuela...

 with the Aulos Ensemble from the late seventies to the late eighties.
Discussion
Ask a question about 'Richard Taruskin'
Start a new discussion about 'Richard Taruskin'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum
 
Quotations

The nice thing about an -ism, someone once observed, is how quickly it becomes a wasm. Some musical wasms—academic-wasm, for example, and its dependent varieties of modern-wasm and Serial-wasm—continue to linger on artifical life support, thought, and continue to threaten the increasingly fragile classical ecosystem."

New York Times, March 10, 1996. Quoted in Ashby, Arved, ed. (2004). The Pleasure of Modernist Music. ISBN 1580461433.
Encyclopedia
Richard Taruskin (born 1945) is an American musicologist, music historian, and critic who has written about the theory of performance, Russian music, fifteenth-century music, twentieth-century music, nationalism, the theory of modernism, and analysis. As a choral conductor he directed the Columbia University Collegium Musicum. He played the viol
Viol
The viol is any one of a family of bowed, fretted, stringed musical instruments developed in the mid-late 1400s and used primarily in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The family is related to and descends primarily from the Spanish vihuela...

 with the Aulos Ensemble from the late seventies to the late eighties. He received various awards for his scholarship, including the Noah Greenberg Prize (1978) from the American Musicological Society, the Alfred Einstein Award (1980), the Dent Medal (1987), the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (1988) and the 1997 and 2006 Kinkeldey Prizes from the American Musicological Society. He is a professor of musicology at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines...

, holding the Class of 1955 Chair. He has also written extensively for lay readers, including numerous articles in The New York Times. His book on Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor, widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential composers of 20th century music. He was a quintessentially cosmopolitan Russian who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of...

 shows that the composer drew on much more Russian folk material than has previously been recognized, and analyzes the historical trends that caused Stravinsky not to be forthcoming about some of these borrowings. Taruskin has also been an influential critic of the premises of the "early-music" movement in classical-music performance; much of his writing has been collected in his book Text and Act.

Books

  • Music in the Western World: A History in Documents compiled and edited by Taruskin and Piero Weiss (New York and London, 1984)
  • Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton University Press, 1993)
  • Text and Act (Oxford University Press, 1995)
  • Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra (University of California Press, 1996)
  • Defining Russia Musically: historical and hermeneutical essays (Princeton University Press, 1997).
  • The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 volumes, (Oxford University Press, 2005) (Kinkeldey winner, 2006)
  • The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (University of California Press, 2009)

External links