#taruskin

[pictresque]

You can stretch every glance out into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a breath - such concentration can only be possible in proportion to the absence of self-pity.

Arnold Schoenberg, in a preface to Webern

[ihavenothingtosayandimsayingit]

Willed amnesia, however, is not quite the same as amnesty, which implies contrition and forgiveness. It can be a dangerous game: it offers solace, but it can also offer cover. The repressed memory, not only psychoanalysts but countless playwrights and novelists have warned, is the breeding ground of phobias.

Music in the Late Twentieth Century, p.18 (Richard Taruskin)

[bflatpenguin]

The scherzo that follows is mainly quiet, ghostly, a little macabre, with a virtually pointillistic trio highlighting what sounds like a distant drum and bugle corps.

Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, p. 279 on Tchaikovsky Orchestral Suite No. 3

[buff4ams]

Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin is gettin' buff for AMS.

[tekaihau]

Any listener who by now is not feeling "yearning, yearning, unquenchable, ever-regenerated longing - languishing thirsting," et cetera, has simply never learned to respond to the syntax of tonal music.

Richard Taruskin, on the beginning of Wagner's prelude to Tristan und Isolde

[operschatz]

A different, far more generous critical perspective on opera now seems gradually to be gaining the upper hand, just as, with Bianconi and some others, a new historiography of the genre is taking shape. It rejects the utopian promesse du bonheur, the promise of a perfect poietic wholeness, and centers on esthesis, on performance and reception as the locus of operatic value...Voice, cry, throat: that is where opera lives.

Richard Taruskin, 'Of Kings and Divas' in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (225)

[operschatz]

It is by no means stretching a point, therefore, to say that movies are the operas of the twentieth century. The creative energy that used to be invested in the opera business now goes into the movie industry; and the blockbuster emotional experiences that operas used to deliver are now far more dependably administered by the big screen. All that opera can uniquely claim (and it is, of course, a big thing) is the charismatic dramatic singer. But the charismatic opera singers of today, and they are notoriously few, exercise their numinous powers almost exclusively in the museum repertory, not in the contemporary one. Contemporary composers of operas do not even call upon their services - unless, like John Corigliano in The Ghosts of Versailles, they are trading in pastiche, which is another way of acknowledging the eclipse of opera as a contemporary art.

Richard Taruskin, 'The Golden Age of Kitsch' in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (247-248)

[personalintelligence]

I just found the most hilarious musicology blog (wordpress).

The Taruskin Challange.

Two musicology grad students decided to take on the challenge of reading all the way through each and every volum of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music.

It's actually a really cool blog, though. But the first two entries made me laugh a lot.

It's worth checking out!