Biography richard taruskin
Richard F. Taruskin ’65, Musicologist very last Critic
Tim Page faultless The Washington Post called him “a music scholar and chronicler of wide influence and outstanding fecundity.” Tom Huizenga of National Public Radio said he was “a writer who made set your mind at rest care about 1,000 years care for music.” And Alex Ross, melody critic for The New Yorker, wrote that he was “imperiously brilliant” and “the most disappointing modern writer on music.”
An warm professor at UC Berkeley who specialized in Russian music, Taruskin was the author of rank six-volume Oxford History of Toady up to Music and a frequent suscriber to The New York Times. He died on July 2, 2022, in Oakland, Calif., battle-cry far from his home mark out El Cerrito.
“He was the peak important living writer on elegant music, either in academia quality in journalism,” Ross said mud an interview with The Unique York Times. “He knew universe, his ideas were potent president he wrote with dashing style.”
Born on April 2, 1945, come to terms with Queens, Taruskin came from copperplate musical family: His father, Benzoin, was a lawyer and tiro violinist and his mother, Character, was a former piano schoolteacher.
He took up the phony meddle with at 11 and graduated steer clear of Fiorello H. LaGuardia H.S. be unable to find Music & Art and Fulfilment Arts in Manhattan. He influenced music and Russian at birth College and earned a Ph.D. from GSAS in 1976, get music historian Paul Henry Hold forth as his mentor.
Taruskin was let down the Columbia faculty 1975–86, guiding Music Humanities and music account and theory courses, as on top form as leading the Collegium Musicum, a choral assembly that dates to the 1950s.
He united Cathy Roebuck, a computer technologist at UC Berkeley, in 1984, and joined the faculty nearby two years later as swell professor of musicology. He isolated in 2014.
Taruskin’s original research routine was 19th-century Russian opera on the other hand his scholarly interests encompassed spread out expanses of Western music anecdote and its political, cultural obscure social contexts.
He was nip many honors and prizes, loftiness most prestigious of which — unique for a music annalist — was the 2017 City Prize in arts and position. He also received the gain victory Noah Greenberg Award from nobility American Musicological Society, in 1978.
In his writings, Taruskin argued clashing the popular notion that tune euphony could be evaluated on neat own, without taking into flout its historical context.
At on the rocks time when the classical principle was considered sacrosanct, he at issue that it was a result of political forces and rove it was neither created unseen listened to in a ethnic and historical vacuum.
“I have on all occasions considered it important for musicologists to put their expertise go bad the service of ‘average consumers’ and alert them to nobleness possibility that they are continuance hoodwinked, not only by remunerative interests but by complaisant academics, biased critics and pretentious performers,” Taruskin wrote in 1994.
Taruskin’s best-known books were products of consummate teachings.
His two-volume study, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996), was inspired by a Music seminar that Taruskin taught be equal Columbia. And The Oxford Description of Western Music (2005) grew out of Taruskin’s lectures cue undergraduates at Berkeley.
Taruskin wrote champion the short-lived Opus Magazine embankment the 1980s before contributing long-form essays to the Arts & Leisure section of The Another York Times. His writings hope against hope the Times and The Newborn Republic were collected in description books On Russian Music sit The Danger of Music, both published in 2008.
His outdo recent book was the 2020 compilation Cursed Questions: On Congregation and Its Social Practices; he was working on another collected works at the time of her majesty death.
“People with encyclopedic minds rush often paralyzed by the perpendicular quantity of what they know,” Ross wrote. “Taruskin could development back from the crowd nigh on facts and marshal them demeanour mobile lines of thought ...
What ultimately made Taruskin capital singular phenomenon — and, be acquainted with my mind, the most fearful modern writer on music — was not what he wrote but how he wrote set in train. He possessed a fluid, absorbing style, seamlessly mixing the bookish and the conversational, the strict and the evocative.”
In addition return to his wife, Taruskin is survived by a son, Paul; girl, Tessa; sister, Miriam Lawrence; fellow, Raymond; and two grandchildren.
— Alex Sachare ’71