{"id":24877,"date":"2022-07-01T12:32:38","date_gmt":"2022-07-01T17:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=24877"},"modified":"2022-07-01T12:32:38","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T17:32:38","slug":"obit-watch-july-1-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=24877","title":{"rendered":"Obit watch: July 1, 2022."},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Taruskin<\/a>, musicologist.<\/p>\n

An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite writings represented a bygone era in which clashes over the meaning of classical music held mainstream import.<\/a>
\n\u201cHe was the most important living writer on classical music, either in academia or in journalism,\u201d said Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, in a recent interview. \u201cHe knew everything, his ideas were potent, and he wrote with dashing style.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

His words were anything but sterile: Mr. Taruskin courted controversy in nearly everything he wrote. In the late 1980s, he helped ignite the so-called \u201cShostakovich Wars\u201d by critiquing the veracity of \u201cTestimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov\u201d (1979), which portrayed the composer as a secret dissident. (Mr. Volkov is a journalist, historian and musicologist.) Drawing on a careful debunking by the scholar Laurel Fay, Mr. Taruskin called the book\u2019s positive reception \u201cthe greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

Mr. Taruskin\u2019s most consequential flamethrowing was his campaign against the movement for \u201chistorically authentic\u201d performances of early music. In a series of essays anthologized in his 1995 book \u201cText and Act,\u201d he argued that the use of period instruments and techniques was an outgrowth of contemporary tastes. He didn\u2019t want conductors like Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Roger Norrington to stop performing; he just wanted them to drop the pretense of \u201cauthenticity.\u201d And many did.<\/a>
\n\u201cBeing the true voice of one\u2019s time is (as Shaw might have said) roughly 40,000 times as vital and important as being the assumed voice of history,\u201d he wrote in The Times in 1990. \u201cTo be the expressive medium of one\u2019s own age is \u2014 obviously, no? \u2014 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.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…<\/p>\n

\u201cI have always considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise at the service of \u2018average consumers\u2019 and alert them to the possibility that they are being hoodwinked, not only by commercial interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics, and pretentious performers,\u201d he wrote in 1994.<\/a>
\nMr. Ross said: \u201cWhether you judged him right or wrong, he made you feel that the art form truly mattered on the wider cultural stage.\u201d Mr. Taruskin\u2019s polemics, he added, \u201cultimately served a constructive goal of taking classical music out of fantasyland and into the real world.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Taruskin, musicologist. An emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a specialist in Russian music, Mr. Taruskin was the author of a number of groundbreaking musicological studies, including the sweeping six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. He was also a contributor to The New York Times, where his trenchant, witty, and erudite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,97,40,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-music","category-obits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24877"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24879,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24877\/revisions\/24879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}