Richard Taruskin: Shall We Change the Subject? A Music Historian Reflects

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Presidential Lecturer

Richard Taruskin reflected on the historiography of music and its embrace of a Whiggish paradigm that he argues has had a deleterious effect on the value and practice of music. Taruskin's extensive work as a scholar and music journalist has earned him the title "America's national musicologist" ("Der Spiegel"). A specialist in Russian and Soviet music, twentieth-century music, the theory of performance, music and politics, and general historiography, Taruskin has authored and edited numerous books and articles, most recently the six-volume "Oxford History of Western Music" (2005) and "Music in the Western World: A History in Documents" (2007).