On Russian Music
by Richard Taruskin
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard TaruskinEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-12-02
ISBN: 0520249798
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Reviews of On Russian Music
Book Review: Hugely stimulating, often provocative
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a book that no lover of Russian music should miss. Just in case you don't know, Richard Taruskin is one of the brightest and most trenchant musicologists around today, with a formidable range of expertise, as his six-volume `Oxford History of Western Music' has demonstrated, particularly since his idea of musical history is not just a story about notes but places them in a cultural and historical setting. The present volume is made up of occasional articles and reviews, but they form a satisfying sequence, leading us from Glinka right down to the present day. Particularly impressive is a series of pieces on Tchaikovsky, where Taruskin criticizes the conventional picture that treats nineteenth-century German music as normative and everything else as `nationalist', not to say provincial. He shows how Tchaikovsky is just as indebted to Russian sources as Mussorgsky, but must be treated as primarily a composer in the European mainstream. He is effective in demolishing the view that Tchaikovsky was a guilt-ridden homosexual, whose music is self-indulgent and at times hysterical. In what is perhaps the best chapter in the book he argues that we are wrong to enjoy Evgeny Onegin condescendingly, as it were great fun but not worthy of Puskhin, since the orchestral accompaniment makes all sorts of subtle points and connections, akin to the authorial voice in the Pushkin poem. This volume has nothing, strangely, on Stravinsky and Scriabin and their generation, but a whole series of pieces on Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Taruskin adds powerful support to Laurel Fay's demolition of the pseudo-Shostakovich 'Testimony'. The volume concludes (almost) with a wide-ranging piece on post-Shostakovich Russian music, though omitting Schnittke and Gubaidulina. It is a real strength of the volume that it does not, however, reduce the reader to dumb admiration, but often provokes disagreement. I would particularly protest against his view that any interpretation of music that satisfies our 'private, selfish interests' is 'justified by securing these benefits' (p. 356) - as if the value of music did not lie precisely in its ability to take us beyond the mushy terrain of solipsistic fantasy. Taruskin is deeply concerned by what he perceives as the marginal status of classical music in modern culture, as if it had nothing to do with serious concerns, but here he is contributing to its trivialization.
Summary of On Russian Music
Over the past four decades, Richard Taruskin's publications have redefined the field of Russian-music study. This volume gathers thirty-six essays on composers ranging from Bortnyansky in the eighteenth century to Tarnopolsky in the twenty-first, as well as all of the famous names in between. Some of these pieces, like the ones on Chaikovsky's alleged suicide and on the interpretation of Shostakovich's legacy, have won fame in their own right as decisive contributions to some of the most significant debates in contemporary musicology. An extensive introduction lays out the main issues and a justification of Taruskin's approach, seen both in the light of his intellectual development and in that of the changing intellectual environment, which has been particularly marked by the end of the cold war in Europe.History & Criticism Books
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