Full Description
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.
Contents
preface: against utopia / ix 1. Et in Arcadia Ego; or, I Didn't Know I Was Such a Pessimist until I Wrote This Thing (a talk) / 1 From the New York Times, mostly 2. Only Time Will Cover the Taint / 21 3. "Nationalism": Colonialism in Disguise? / 25 4. Why Do They All Hate Horowitz? / 30 5. Optimism amid the Rubble / 37 6. A Survivor from the Teutonic Train Wreck / 43 7. Does Nature Call the Tune? / 46 8. Two Stabs at the Universe / 51 Away with the Ives Myth: The "Universe" Is Here at Last / 51 Out of Hibernation: Ives's Mythical Beast / 55 9. In Search of the "Good" Hindemith Legacy / 60 10. Six Times Six: A Bach Suite Selection / 66 11. A Beethoven Season? / 71 12. Dispelling the Contagious Wagnerian Mist / 81 13. How Talented Composers Become Useless / 86 14. Making a Stand against Sterility / 94 15. A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the Twenty-first Century / 98 16. Calling All Pundits: No More Predictions! / 104 17. In The Rake's Progress, Love Conquers (Almost) All / 109 18. Markevitch as Icarus / 118 19. Let's Rescue Poor Schumann from His Rescuers / 124 20. Early Music: Truly Old-Fashioned at Last? / 129 21. Bartok and Stravinsky: Odd Couple Reunited? / 133 22. Wagner's Antichrist Crashes a Pagan Party / 138 23. A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism / 144 24. Corraling a Herd of Musical Mavericks / 153 25. Can We Give Poor Orff a Pass at Last? / 161 26. The Danger of Music and the Case for Control / 165 27. Ezra Pound: A Slim Sound Claim to Musical Immortality / 181 28. Underneath the Dissonance Beat a Brahmsian Heart / 186 29. Enter Boris Goudenow, Just 295 Years Late / 191 For the New Republic, mostly 30. The First Modernist / 195 31. The Dark Side of the Moon / 202 32. Of Kings and Divas / 217 33. The Golden Age of Kitsch / 241 34. No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage / 261 35. Sacred Entertainments / 280 36. The Poietic Fallacy / 301 37. The Musical Mystique: Defending Classical Music against Its Devotees / 330 From the scholarly press 38. Revising Revision / 354 39. Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology / 382 40. She Do the Ring in Different Voices / 406 41. Stravinsky and Us / 420 Envoi 42. Setting Limits (a talk) / 448 index / 000
