A Richard Taruskin Playlist

Musicologist Richard Taruskin, who died on July 1 at the age of 77, once recalled a note he’d received from his colleague Susan McClary, saying that the two were “among the few comic writers in an otherwise grim and humorless discipline.” 

At times, this could be “funny ha-ha.” After quoting a set of debatable claims made about Tchaikovsky by 19th-century critic Vladimir Stasov, who concluded that the composer’s anti-nationalistic style “suited Europe to a T,” Taruskin responded: “Lucky bastard!” before moving into a debunking of Stasov’s arguments. Other times, Taruskin was downright salty. He had a low tolerance for bullshit, though at times his views on what constituted bullshit could be myopic. Composer John Adams compared some of Taruskin’s non-academic writings to watching true crime: “There must always be a body count at the end, whether the target is Prokofiev, Shostakovich scholars, or anyone else he decides to humiliate.” (Taruskin himself republished this quote in his 2008 book, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays.)

Still, if anyone advocated for holding two truths at the same time, it was Taruskin. His writing was enlightening, explicit, explosive, emphatic, epigrammatic, eristical, and earnest in its commitment to drawing back the curtain on works of music (particularly those by Russian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries) for general audiences as well as academic peers, placing them into context with the trained eye and steady hand of a jeweler.