Richard Filler Taruskin[6] was born on April 2, 1945, in New York.[4] Taruskin was raised in a family described as liberal, intellectual, Jewish and musical; his mother, Beatrice (Filler), was a piano teacher and father, Benjamin Taruskin, an amateur violinist.[2][7] He attended theHigh School of Music & Art, now part ofFiorello H. LaGuardia High School, where he studied cello.[2] Taruskin went on to receive his B.A.magna cum laude (1965), M.A. (1968), and Ph.D. in historical musicology (1976) fromColumbia University.[7] As a choral conductor he directed the Columbia UniversityCollegium Musicum. He played theviola da gamba with the Aulos Ensemble from the late 1970s to the late 1980s.[2][4]
During his PhD studies, he worked withPaul Henry Lang, who had pioneered placing music within its socio-cultural context, as inMusic in Western Civilization.[6] Through a family member who had stayed in Russia after theRevolution, Taruskin had access to recordings of Russian operas besides the most familiar ones, which sparked his interest in Russian music. He went to Moscow for a year on aFulbright Scholarship, where he was interested not only in the language and music, but also in the way music connects to social and political history. In the 1980s he explored the archives ofIgor Stravinsky when they were held by theNew York Public Library.[1]
Taruskin was on the faculty of Columbia University from 1975 until 1986.[6] He then moved to California as a professor of musicology at theUniversity of California, Berkeley,[1] where he held the Class of 1955 Chair.[2] He retired from Berkeley at the end of 2014.[8]
Taruskin published his first book in 1981,Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the 1860s.[6] He also wrote extensively for lay readers, including numerous articles inThe New York Times beginning in the mid-1980s.[6][9] They were often "lively, erudite, fiercely articulate"[6] and controversial, with targets such asElliott Carter,Carl Orff, andSergei Prokofiev.[6] Many of his articles were collected in books such asText and Act,[10] a volume that exhibits him as having been an influential critic of the premises of the "historically informed performance" movement in classical music,[1][2][9]The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays,[11] andOn Russian Music.[12] His writings frequently took up social, cultural, and political issues in connection with music—for example, the question of censorship. A specific instance was the debate overJohn Adams’s operaThe Death of Klinghoffer.[13][n 1]
Taruskin's extensive 1996 studyStravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra showed thatIgor Stravinsky drew more heavily on Russian folk material than had previously been recognized. The book analyzed the historical trends that caused Stravinsky not to be forthcoming about some of these borrowings.[1][14]
His survey ofWestern classical music appeared as the six-volumeOxford History of Western Music.[2][5] The first volume, devoted toMusic from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, "wove facts and impressions from histories, visual art and architecture", and was characterized at the time of his death as possibly "the best overall introduction to 'early music' available".[6]
Taruskin, Richard (1981).Opera and Drama in Russia: As Preached and Practiced in the 1860s. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.ISBN978-0-8357-1245-3. Republished in 1993, Rochester: University of Rochester Press
—— (1995).Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-535743-1.
—— (1996).Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through Mavra. Vol. 2 volumes. Berkeley: University of California Press.ISBN978-0-520-07099-8.
—— (1982). "'Little Star': an Etude in the Folk Style". In Brown, Malcolm Hamrick (ed.).Musorgsky, in Memoriam, 1881–1981. Ann Arbor:UMI Research Press. pp. 57–84.ISBN978-0-8357-1295-8.
—— (1983). "Handel, Shakespeare, and Musorgksy: The Sources and Limits of Russian Musical Realism".Music and Language. Studies in the history of music. Vol. 1. New York: Broude Bros. pp. 247–268.ISBN978-0-8450-7401-5.
—— (1984). ""The Present in the Past": Russian Opera and Russian Historiography, ca. 1870". In Brown, Malcolm Hamrick (ed.).Russian and Soviet Music: Essays for Boris Schwarz. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. pp. 77–146.ISBN978-0-8357-1295-8.
—— (1984). "The Rite Revisited: the Idea and the Sources of its Scenario". In Hatch, Christopher; Strainchamps, Edmond;Maniates, Maria Rika (eds.).Music and Civilization: Essays in Honor of Paul Henry Lang. New York: W. W. Norton. pp. 183–202.ISBN978-0-393-01677-2.
—— (1985). "Serov and Musorgsky". In Brown, Malcolm Hamrick;Wiley, Roland John (eds.).Slavonic and Western Music: Essays for Gerald Abraham. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. pp. 139–161.ISBN978-0-8357-1594-2.
—— (1986) [1982]. "From Subject to Style: Stravinsky and the Painters". In Pasler, Jann (ed.).Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 16–38.ISBN978-0-520-05403-5.
—— (1987). "Stravinsky's "Rejoicing Discovery" and what it Meant: in Defense of his Notorious Text Setting". In Haimo, Ethan; Johnson, Paul (eds.).Stravinsky Retrospectives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 162–200.ISBN978-0-8032-7301-6.
—— (1988). "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past". InKenyon, Nicholas (ed.).Authenticity and Early Music: A Symposium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 137–210.ISBN978-0-19-816152-3.
—— (1995). "The Traditional Revisited: Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles as Russian Music". In Hatch, Christopher; Bernstein, David W. (eds.).Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past. Chicago: Chicago University Press. pp. 525–550.ISBN978-0-226-31902-5.
—— (1995). "From Fairy Tale to Opera in Four Moves (Not so Simple)". InBauman, Thomas; McClymonds, Marita Petzoldt (eds.).Opera and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 299–307.ISBN978-0-521-46172-6.
^See, for example, “The Klinghoffer Controversy” in Thomas May, ed.,The John Adams Reader (Amadeus Press, 2006), pp. 297–339; Taruskin’s original 2001The New York Times article is reprinted there and, with a lengthy postscript, inThe Danger of Music.
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