July 2, 2022
At a time when the classical canon was considered sacrosanct, [Richard] Taruskin advanced the philosophy that it was a product of political forces."
"His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts. He savagely critiqued this idea of 'music itself,' which, he wrote, represented 'a decontaminated space within which music can be composed, performed and listened to in a cultural and historical vacuum, that is, in perfect sterility.'... Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for 'historically authentic' performances of early music.... 'Being the true voice of one’s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,' he wrote in The Times in 1990. 'To be the expressive medium of one’s own age is — obviously, no? — a far worthier aim than historical verisimilitude. What is verisimilitude, after all, but correctness? And correctness is the paltriest of virtues. It is something to demand of students, not artists.'... The Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, grew out of Mr. Taruskin’s undergraduate lectures at Berkeley and his dissatisfaction with textbooks that presented a parade of unassailable masterpieces...."
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53 comments:
First play it correctly, then you can work on other "virtues'. You're not smarter than Bach.
Dude needs a different hobby.
I was a TA for “the battleship Taruskin” in grad school. He was as old school as it gets, but I heard that if you could make it through his absurdly demanding high standards, he could be extremely supportive. If he sometimes acted as if he knew everything it was because he sort of did. The musical ideas of his that most interested me was his theory that most attempts at “historical music performance” were really more about modern ideals than about “authenticity”. In the narrow field of musicology it was quite provocative and, I thought, true. Our search for “authenticity” is often a foil for our own agenda, and realizing that can be liberating.
RIP
Alternate Headline:
Richard Taruskin, Vigorously Polemical Musicologist, Finally Dies
You don't have to choose one over the other. The emotional appeal to the modern audience and the strangeness of period-true performances are both useful and can be appreciated.
Ironically, he'll probably come to be seen as a voice from a very specific historical moment, while the music will live on.
Five variations on Une jeune fillette pretty much has to be on original instruments (Eustache du Caurroy). Unique blend of viol timbre.
He’s got a point. The best way to play music is the way that sounds best. To play it as it originally sounded as an end in itself is a curiosity, not a meaningful achievement. (Worth noting that it may have sounded a certain way originally not because the composer wanted it to sound just that way, but because that was the sound the orchestra could attain with the available materials and processes used to make the instruments.)
Academics do what they need to do to get published.
Iconoclasm has been the academic fashion since the 60s.
If there were iconoclasts they would eschew sinecures in the academy.
If there were iconoclasts they would burn universities to the ground.
Instead these fake iconoclasts enjoyed their sinecures and the reputations of their institutions that were built by better men.
Obnoxious writer...never use a $2 word when a 50-cent word will do...
There are things that are more important than being right. That said, he wasn't wrong.
On matters of taste, in music, there is nothing but endless dispute. That's why the classics are doing so well today and good paying orchestra jobs are so plentiful. The price for indulging the sweet addiction of that fantasy is very high. The few are lucky, and the lucky are few.
RIP.
First play it correctly, then you can work on other "virtues'. You're not smarter than Bach.
And speaking of Bach, two examples.
One with pretty accurate historical interpretation:
https://youtu.be/p9_hAw8HOMs
One played in the 'sound of our times':
https://youtu.be/vIo59bHw54Q
I am undoubtedly taking whoever this critic was to the point of argumentum ad absurdum in his eyes, but that's what popped in my head on reading this post.
I hope some aficiaonado/a can illuminate :
why would Ayn Rand say her dislike of Beethoven because he had Malevolent Sense of Life?
I hope some aficiaonado/a can illuminate :
why would Ayn Rand say her dislike of Beethoven because he had Malevolent Sense of Life?
On matters of taste, in music, there is nothing but endless dispute.
I see you have also read the comments on Youtube.
Watched "The Red Violin" the other night, and enjoyed the multiple variations of the musical theme in the eras portrayed in the movie, all played by one virtuoso violinist for the actors pretending to fiddle. Centuries of music pleasing the listeners in each moment of playing.
"Obnoxious writer...never use a $2 word when a 50-cent word will do...."
Perhaps one person's $2.00 word is another person's $.50 word.
I grew up listening to the classics done in the mid-century modern style, and when I first heard the Brandenburgs with original instruments and period practice (so-called) it opened up a whole new world to my ears.
Is "authentic" possible, or even desirable? I would say 'yes' to both, but I am not a music scientist, just a guy who likes history and long-hair music (in the original sense).
It's not like classic pieces were static anyway. Allegri's Miserere underwent many changes over time including some due to transcription errors.
I'll trade you a $2 word for four half-dollars.
'Perhaps one person's $2.00 word is another person's $.50 word.'
Only if you are an obnoxious, elitist prick.
As a wee lad, my verbal test scores were off the charts (math not so much), but I talk like a normal person.
it may have sounded a certain way originally not because the composer wanted it to sound just that way, but because that was the sound the orchestra could attain with the available materials and processes used to make the instruments
And you don't think the composer was aware of that and took it into account when composing?
All those old white men are not entitled to respect of their intellectual property.
Allegri's Miserere underwent many changes over time including some due to transcription errors.
Including the women's voices in that YouTube clip.
Bender said...
it may have sounded a certain way originally not because the composer wanted it to sound just that way, but because that was the sound the orchestra could attain with the available materials and processes used to make the instruments
And you don't think the composer was aware of that and took it into account when composing?
***************
Au contraire! I'm sure classical composers hearing their compositions performed for the first time said to themselves:
"What this needs during the second movement is a...a theremin. Yeah, that's it--a spooky theremin.
Too bad none's been invented yet."
Flamethrowers have their uses, but subtlety and nuance aren't their normal hallmark. Taruskin is deeply into the inside-baseball approach to music, assuming that metaphor works in the faculty lounge.
So, he preferred contemporary interpretations and performances of the repertoire, and found the whiff of snobbish elitism that sometimes comes with a focus on historically correct performances a bit off-putting. (Not that the strong scent of the same thing in his diatribe isn't also a bit off-putting.) All fine. And it may be true that "correctness is the paltriest of virtues," but it's still admittedly a virtue (and others will rank the virtues a bit differently).
Very bizarre to be tilting against the notion that the "classical canon" is "considered sacrosanct" during the period in which he was writing. Someone should have told Schoenberg, Berg and Stravinsky a hundred years ago, putting aside the many contemporary composers active since their time. Beethoven was famous for taking a sledge-hammer to all manor of classical forms, and even in the 19th century many followed his lead. The suggestion (Althouse word of the day!) that musical forms have been stuck in some "classical" form is just ridiculous, even though it's true that many enjoy performances that try to capture that sound.
As for his larger claim, who ever really thought that "Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts"? True enough that many who enjoy the music aren't familiar with the historical context, but that's a different point (and not one limited to music). Many don't know what sonata form is, can't explain the difference between music of the baroque, the classic and the romantic periods, have no idea what bel canto or verismo are all about, and don't get at all impressionistic period music, to say nothing of tonal and more contemporary stuff. So what? Take from it what you can, in whatever way it speaks to you.
As for 'historically authentic' performances, usually meaning music played on period instruments and using period performance standards, they can be quite charming. Anyone who has heard performances by William Christie's Les Arts Florissants or Christopher Hogwood's Academy of Ancient Music or Harnoncourt's Concentus Musicus Wien, to name only three of the more prominent groups, knows that perfectly well. Christie's group has often performed in NYC (he is from Princeton and seems to like the neighborhood even though he moved to France long ago) and always sells out the house (deservedly so). Those groups have revived a lot of forgotten early music, mostly composed before Bach.
Of course, Taruskin knew all of this better than me. He just enjoyed wielding his flamethrower a bit too much. Thankfully, like him, we all get to decide for ourselves. And, with any luck, also get to enjoy the music along the way (as I'm sure he did too).
"As a wee lad, my verbal test scores were off the charts (math not so much), but I talk like a normal person."
How does a "normal" person speak? What is a "normal" person? "Normal" in what social stratum?
His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts.....Mr. Taruskin’s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for 'historically authentic' performances of early music....
I read a lot of Taruskin's writings, since he was often published in The New Republic, among other journals I read at the time. I always thought that one big problem with Taruskin's thought can be perfectly encapsulated in the two sentences I have excerpted above --- if music can't be divorced from historical context, how can it be divorced from the physicality of the instruments that it was created for & played on? Taruskin just wanted the important "historical contexts" to be whatever bones he wanted to pick at, and not the "historical contexts" that the Historically-Informed performance (AKA original instrument) crew wanted to emphasize.**
I actually think his best stuff was his writings on Russian music which I think was his doctoral specialty.
** In writing this, I must admit that I am an Original Instrument bigot of the first order, and that certainly colored my view of Taruskin's work.
he preferred contemporary interpretations and performances of the repertoire
So I went to the Met earlier this year to see Lucia di Lammermoor. It was performed with contemporary 20th-21st century costumes and staging. It was good, not great. Good because of the music and singing, which thankfully they did not update into rap. But I would have liked to have seen a traditional version. Our fellow box companions hated it. They wanted the traditional version too.
When I saw Madame Butterfly in D.C., the staging consisted of a bunch of geometric shapes. Other stage productions of plays have gotten the same treatment.
You know, when people have the VERY RARE opportunity to see these operas, plays, classical music pieces in person, they deserve to see/hear the traditional version. Leave the experimental and hip updated versions for low-level community companies.
I am really too grieved to speak about this much. Richard Taruskin was the man who singlehandedly persuaded me to study musicology. At the time I was an undergraduate mechanical engineering student at Cal, but also one who spent a lot of time round Hertz and Morrison (the music buildings) and played violin and then viola for several years in the University Symphony.
My then-boyfriend, now-husband was amused at the way I used to bound up to Prof. T's office like an eager puppy with some discovery in Shostakovich, b/c RT was a new and very formidable character in the Dept. About the fifth time I did this (I think it was finding a small harmonic quotation of the 14th Quartet in the 15th), he looked at me and said, "You have a good ear. Have you ever considered musicology?" I hadn't, but then I did.
I didn't end up his student -- I wound up studying the Haydn quartets, with Daniel Heartz, who is also deceased -- but we remained friends. The last time I emailed him was a couple weeks ago, and he told me he was in hospital, probably well into July. I wasn't to let that news spread further, and I didn't, apart from telling my husband, another Taruskin student.
You people going on about "authenticity" just need to read Text & Act, that's all. His argument isn't at all the one the obit has him making.
Marc, are you by any chance Marc Lowenstein?
RIP, but now that he is gone, can his ideas be divorced from their historical context? Asking for a friend
John Lukacs once wrote to the effect that it is perfectly plausible to think that some day a historian could write a valuable book about "military history from Bach to Beethoven."
Which is to say, the art of a time or epoch is inextricably bound to the rest of the culture, with connections and correspondences that are in theory discoverable by historical research and inquiry.
As a literal matter, it's not likely; as a reminder that our boundaries and categories are often pretty artificial, that we need to see and hear as much of the evidence as we can find, it has stuck with me.
I'm not -very- particular about opera stagings, and enjoyed the Met's Ring Cycle with the big machine some years ago (which I saw remotely). They left the music alone, at least.
Some contemporary versions on new instruments is fine.
I liked Switched-On Bach by Walter Carlos.
Oops. Should I have posted this in the Jordan Peterson thread?
'How does a "normal" person speak? What is a "normal" person? "Normal" in what social stratum?'
I try to keep it at +/- 100 IQ level, though I am willing to lower that bar for you...
I hope classical concerts are coming back from covid. I used to go all the time, living in music rich LA. Not since the pandemic. Maybe in a few months, but every time I think about it there is a new local surge.
Before covid the audiences skewed old. The young musicians who were inexpensive to watch skewed Asian. Anything that makes classical music appealing to new audiences is to be encouraged. Not a big enough audience for feuds among experts. Let 100 flowers bloom. (Okay to use that expression?)
I looked at the Bach cello offerings (ha) of Aught Severn and the modern multi-instrument version struck me as an interesting rendition but not something I'd like to hear a lot more of.
The French guitarist Tina S plays the 3rd mvmt of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata with superb (to this layman) technique, but she has a rhythm section to back her up.
Readering,
Anything that makes classical music appealing to new audiences is to be encouraged.
You ought to be happy, then: symphony orchestras are doing just that. They are backup bands for rock groups; they are soundtrack-players for film screenings; they will play "crossover" anything, so long as it doesn't sound too much like, well, classical music; they will entertain DJs and all sorts of other music apart from the Western classical tradition. What I don't see is what attracts me (and a lot of other people) to classical music, which is the music.
Even genres you'd think pretty well impervious to this sort of thing are bowing to it. There are proposals now to ban string quartets from international competitions unless they have at least one female and one "minority" member (Asians of course don't count). And pieces by "minorities" (again, Asians apart) are de rigueur in any chamber ensemble's repertoire.
I have no problem with ensembles that want to do any of these things, but they are essentially mandatory today, and that's ridiculous, as you would see if the same rules were applied to (say) gagaku or gamelan or Irish folk dancing or Balkan folk singing. or Tuvan throat singing.
As for "music-rich," I lived in London for one year. Someone was doing all of Schoenberg. Messiaen's and Carter's 80th birthdays were that year, so there were elaborate cycles of both composers' works, including the Arditti Qt. doing all of Carter's then-four quartets in one day. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was doing all sorts of things -- I remember Haydn's "Paris" Symphonies (82-87) in two evenings, and Mozart's last three symphonies in another one. And the Proms! Wonderful, fantastic programs every night, for about two months. Quartets everywhere, including all of Haydn's over two days (I was in the "Emergency Quartet," delegated to perform anything that needed to be done when someone failed to show up or two groups mistakenly prepared the same piece, and we did end up playing Op. 50/5 -- "The Dream"). I have never been more overwhelmed by music, not even in eight years at Juilliard Pre-College.
Is all of this to be "improved" away so as to get more young people in the audience? I was a young person at the time, twenty years old.
I (Marc in Eugene) am not a great fan of Text and Act but certainly Richard Taruskin was a wonderful historian and writer; requiescat in pace.
Hi Michelle -- yes! How are you how are you? I have many fond memories of RT, and I remember him hand copying out his own reductions of Stravinsky excerpts for George's Doctoral exams because he was sure the standard typeface would be recognizable. I hope you are very well!
When the Oregon Bach Festival schedule was first announced in January (or whenever), what immediately caught my eye was a performance of Messiaen's Quattour pour la fin du temps: at last! in my sixth decade of life and at last a concert performance I can attend. But then I began reading the marketing paragraphs, all about 'reframing' it and some Canadian artist's klezmer and electro-acoustic work in the concert and I thought, they are going to screw this up, in the name of diversity, inclusivity, and marketing, with large screen video effects and who knows what. As it turned out, the Messiaen quartet was Messiaen, with the other nonsense cluttering up the aural space around it-- I elected to interpret it all as representing Messiaen's prison camp. (Schubert's Winterreise song cycle last night, with the baritone Tyler Duncan, was also excellent-- Bach's Saint Matthew Passion remains of the season, on Tuesday.). I used to look forward to the emails etc from the Symphony and OBF but these days they are as much paeans to D&I as to the music itself. Am exaggerating a bit.
Hi Marc! I thought it might be you. (I nearly wrote you after a letter published in the NYT many months ago, but at that time you seemed to be in SoCal somewhere, per Google.) How long have you been in Eugene? We're in Salem now, and George is playing in that OBF St. Matthew you just mentioned -- in fact, he just left for the first rehearsal about ten minutes ago. He played in the B-minor Mass as well, and almost in the St. John -- a player dropped out due to COVID and Kati Kyme recommended him to replace her, but apparently they decided to play a violin short.
George is unfortunately in Orchestra II for the St. Matthew, so sits out many of the best arias and gets to play in some of the more intonationally brutal ones ("Blute nur" comes to mind).
Oh yes, I remember RT getting sly with the Stravinsky excerpts! Though I don't think he hand-copied them; IIRC George said that they were all piano reductions taken from various books, so scoring as well as typeface was obscured. We still have George's "Firebird-O-Matic" from his RT Stravinsky independent study; it's a wheel on a sheet of paper, and by spinning it you get various octatonic harmonies and progressions.
I know RT kept his. Also some of George's other whimsies, like the cover of the "Journal of the American Mold and Fungal Society" (Dahlhaus: "Moldprobleme bei Schumann um 1845"), and the Peters Edition cover of Pierre Schmutzig's late sonatas. (For everyone but Marc, "Pierre Schmutzig" was the name of the fictional character who populated RT's Intro to Music class, the one who got everything wrong, like writing a rag with no syncopation in it.)
Good times . . .
Please feel free to contact me at michelledulak-at-aol.com, btw.
You people who live or lived in classical-rich places make me appreciate all the more the little scene we have here.
What MDT describes about crossover and genre-bending we have aplenty, and I avoid it, but it wasn't much different back in the day apparently--at least when it came to musicians' choices.
A musician-musicologist friend of mine did his doctoral dissertation about professional musicians in Memphis and found that even the classically trained and inclined played whatever they could get paid for, regardless of the boundaries.
A new music facility opens on campus this fall, and I look forward to a lot of local and visiting talent on display.
No, Michelle D T, I, Marc in Eugene, am not your friend and colleague Marc L. Sorry for the confusion; I was trying to remove it with my 'not a fan of Text and Act' comment. I would have changed my Blogger name to Marc in Eugene this morning but couldn't recall how to do it.
Oh! My apologies to both Marcs! I am sorry for assuming that there was only one -- though I do relish getting in touch with Marc L. again. We were sort of allies in a roiling environment back then. Nothing compared to the current mess, of course; this was 35 years ago.
"His bête noire was the widespread notion that Beethoven symphonies and Bach cantatas could be divorced from their historical contexts." I don't know why this would be controversial: of course music is a reflection of the culture that produced it. Just as are painting, sculpture, novels, plays, tv shows, etc.
That's not to say there is, therefore, nothing for a contemporary audience to find in these works, for all times and all places are subject to the human condition. And some works are simply so magnificent that to some extent they can and do project beyond the time and place in which they were crated. Nonetheless, how could someone not argue that art invariably reflects the culture within and from which it was created?
(Which, I suppose, is depressing when one realizes how ugly so much contemporary music and art has become.)
Caligula,
The thing is, Taruskin would take that truism and run with it, to the point of rubbing the public's collective nose in it. And it was a pretty big public, given that he wrote several large pieces for the NYT, as well as the ones someone mentions above for the New Republic.
Take the NYT piece about the Harnoncourt/Leonhardt Bach cantata cycle. He loved many of those performances (Harnoncourt's more than Leonhardt's) precisely because they were ugly; they were designed to portray ugly things. I had forgotten that Leonhardt got Cantata 170, which is a pity; after a flat-out gorgeous opening movement and a short recitative, it goes into one of the most harrowing things I've ever played in my life -- a long aria with no bassline, only the upper strings in unison, a gibbering organ obbligato, and the abyss below. It winds round to many keys, never giving you the least sense of direction, and every time it looks like you have found a way out, it swerves away again. It seems to go on for hours, and the string unisons in uncomfortable keys make every step a ghastly risk.
But RT has some doozies from Harnoncourt: the "French overture straight from hell" that opens Cantata 178; the aria "Schweig nur, taumelnde Vernuft!," which is to say, "Shut up, stumbling Reason!" later in the same piece, where a hectoring tenor shouts "Schweig!" at ever-increasing intervals. Or the next cantata, 179, where . . . let RT tell it:
The whole performance sounds loathesome and disgraceful. And these are the words: "My sins sicken me like pus in my bones; help me, Jesus, Lamb of God, for I am sinking in deepest slime." Perform this aria with a hale and hearty mezzo-soprano full of strong musical views, accompany her with a pair of brand new English horns spiffily played, and only "the music itself" will gain, not the aria, which utterly depends on its performers' failings, and on the imperfections of their equipment, to make its harrowing point.
The article is in Text & Act, btw, pp. 305ff. Also in there are "Resisting the Ninth" (RT gave me a copy of the typed version before it went to press!) and "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past, which is maybe the best single-essay summary of RT's views on "authenticity."
No apologies necessary here, Michelle, ha. I'm glad I got to hear your husband in the Mass and hope to again on Tuesday. :-)
The three major Bach choral works, Das Musicalisches Opfer, Winterreise, and the Messiaen were what I could manage this season.
OK, the important question: Ta'-rus-kin? Ta-rus'-kin? Something else?
I subscribed to the New Rep from about 1985 to 2010 or so. Looked forward to his columns.
I've never heard the name pronounced by someone who could be expected to know how to do so correctly. MDT....
The second one.
Incidentally, one of his tiffs among musicologists was with Allan Ho and Dmitry Feofanov about their The New Shostakovich, a book that purports to "decode" the composer's works so as to find Stalin everywhere. RT once heard me say "Feofanov" with the accent on the second syllable. He asked me why, and I said, "I guessed." And he replied that it was odd, b/c Feofanov himself pronounces it that way, but in Russian standard usage, the accent is on the third syllable.
One more pronunciation-adjacent anecdote: In his non-major Intro to Music class, RT used the first movement of Beethoven 6 to illustrate the use of motives. He put words to the opening bars: "Taruskin zip-a-dee-doo-dah let's all go to the store," and then used them to show which bits were being used where. I'm not sure which pleased him more -- the place where the orchestra shouts in unison "TA-RUS-KIN!," or the beginning of the development, which is a long riff on "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah."
Thanks, MDT. I thought Ta-rus'-kin but wasn't sure.
I don't know about Stalin everywhere in DS's music, but that cello concerto . . .
I'll listen to the Pastoral with different ears now, too.
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