In this new and final collection, Richard Taruskin gathers a sweeping range of keynote speeches, reviews, and critical essays from the first twenty years of the twenty-first century. With twenty-three essays in total, this volume presents five lectures delivered in Budapest on Hungarian music and ten essays on Russian music. Reviews of contemporary work in musicology and reflections on the place of music in society showcase Taruskin’s trademark wit and breadth. Musical Lives and Times Examined is an essential collection, a comprehensive portrait of a distinguished figure in music studies, illuminating the ideas that have transformed the discipline and will continue to do so.

About the Author

Richard Taruskin (1945–2022) was Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a dozen books, including The Oxford History of Western Music, major studies of Stravinsky and other topics in Russian music, and an especially influential book of essays on musical performance, Text and Act.

Contents

In Lieu of Dedication: Fine Friends, Presiding Spirits—László
Somfai, Lyudmila Kovnatskaya, Richard L. Crocker

1. The Many Dangers of Music

LACI RESZE (LACI'S PART)
2. Liszt and Bad Taste
3. Goldmark’s Queen: On Signifiers
4. Why You Cannot Leave Bartók Out
5. Liszt’s Problems, Bartók’s Problems, My Problems
6. Kodály’s Pitiful Lament—and Mine

милина часть (MILA'S PART)
7. Russian Responses to Bach
8. So Much More Than a Composer
9. Rimsky-Korsakov Catches Up
10. Prokofieff’s Problems—and Ours
11. Коле посвящается (for Kolya)
12. In from the Cold
13. Flesh and Blood Juke Box
14. Tales of Push and Pull
15. Was Shostakovich a Martyr, or Is That Just Fiction?
16. How to Win a Stalin Prize: Shostakovich and His Quintet

PARS RICARDI PRIMI (RICARDUS PRIMUS'S PART)
17. Shooting a White Elephant
18. Is This a Thing?
19. Exoticism and Authenticity
20. Pathos Is Banned
21. Everybody Gotta Be Someplace: On Context
22. Alluring Failure, Exhilarating Defeat

23. Envoi: All Was Foreseen; Nothing Was Foreseen
Acknowledgments
Index

Reviews

"It has, inevitably, a valedictory air, but does not on that account lack energy or focus. Quite the opposite: it will surely be a rare reader indeed who does not come away from having read it fascinated, provoked, inspired, or irritated."

— Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

"Musicology’s all-time happiest warrior leaves us with an omnibus collection that balances history and historiography, past and present, East and West, while exploring presentism and intolerant progressivism as well as the bad blood between music history and theory. Even when he’s reminiscing, the writing is fresh and often very funny, teeming with bright ideas that will take on lives of their own."—Simon Morrison, Princeton University

"Who else but Richard Taruskin could combine dazzling erudition with such humor and irresistible charm? His final book, cast as a series of gracious and heartfelt tributes to beloved friends, is the ultimate measure of the man himself, the embodiment of one who always sought, in Joseph Kerman's words, 'broad, original, humane horizons' in music."—Pauline Fairclough, University of Bristol

"For nearly four decades, Richard Taruskin tried to reverse the decline in status suffered by art music in the United States, arguing that music must be emancipated from its purely aesthetic ghetto and brought into contact with the public's most pressing ethical and political concerns. One is grateful for this latest collection of his inimitably brilliant and informative dispatches from the cultural battlefield and sad to learn that it will be his last one."—Karol Berger, Stanford University

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews