Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin (born April 2, 1945 in New York City ) is an American musicologist, music critic and music historian.

Taruskin, the son of a piano teacher and an amateur violinist, learned to play the cello, attended the High School of Music and Art in New York and studied Russian, musicology and music history at Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in 1965 ( magna cum laude ), his master’s degree in 1968 and his doctorate in 1976. He then taught as a professor at Columbia University. He played in ensembles for early music, for example viola da gamba in the Aulos Ensemble from the late 1970s to the 1980s . He also worked as a choir director, from 1968 to 1973 at Columbia University Collegium Musicum and from 1975 to 1983 in the Capella nova choir . In 1986 he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley .

With his groups for early music he recorded several records and he published renaissance music with the publishing house Ogni Sorte. Including critical editions by Antoine Busnoys , whom he identified as the founder of the L'homme armé tradition, and William Lawes . But he also emerged as a critic of dogmatic tendencies in historical performance practice .

He is particularly known for his publications on classical music in Russia, for example the relationship between Igor Stravinsky and Russian folklore and Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky . He has published regularly as a music critic in The New York Times and New Republic, and essays by him have been published in the anthology Text and Act , others in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays and On Russian Music .

In 1978 he received the Greenberg Prize, 1980 the Alfred Einstein Award, 1987 the Dent Medal. His book on Stravinsky received the 1997 Kinkeldey Prize. He has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1998 .

In 2017 he received the Kyoto Prize .

Works

• Opera and Drama in Russia: As Preached and Practiced in the 1860s , University of Missouri Press 1981, reissue University of Rochester Press, 1993
• Editor with P. Weiss: Music in the Western World: A History in Documents , Schirmer, 1984, 2nd edition Thomson / Schirmer, 2008
• Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue , Princeton University Press, 1993
• Text and Act , Oxford University Press, 1995
• Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra , 2 volumes, University of California Press, 1996
• Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical essays , Princeton University Press, 1997
• Published by: Oxford History of Western Music , 6 volumes, Oxford University Press, 2005, 2009, 2nd edition in 5 volumes 2010
• The Danger of Music: And Other Anti-Utopian Essays , University of California Press, 2008
• On Russian Music , University of California Press, 2008
• Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays , University of California Press, 2016

Web links

• Berkeley Music
• Biography at Stanford Presidential Lectures