Richard Filler Taruskin, 1945–2022

The AMS mourns the passing of Richard Filler Taruskin, Honorary Member of the AMS and winner of the Society’s Noah Greenberg Prize (1978), Otto Kinkeldey Award (2006 & 1997), and Alfred Einstein Award (1980). Emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Taruskin was a specialist in Russian music and eminent scholar of classical music. Noted for his six-volume Oxford History of Western Music and for being a music scholar of wide influence, Taruskin died of esophageal cancer and is survived by his wife, Cathy Roebuck Taruskin. To read more about his life and work, see the obituaries published by The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR.

Below is an obituary for Richard Taruskin commissioned by the American Musicological Society that explores his extensive contributions to the field of musicology.

Richard Filler Taruskin, Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, died on July 1, 2022. He was a leading expert on Russian and Soviet music, twentieth-century music, and the Western art music tradition writ large. Yet focusing on his nominal areas of specialization misses the breadth and depth of his interests and the themes that motivated his research across his career: counteracting the “ghettoization” of Eastern European composers; historicizing historicism and its myth of eternal progress; pointing out the connections between modernist esthetics and claims of “authenticity” in early music performance practice; and, perhaps most crucially, contesting the view that music floats above humanity, untainted by politics or other worldly concerns. It was this last target–the idea of musical autonomy in its many manifestations–to which he returned over the longue durée in his Oxford History of Western Music, and especially in the many
keynotes and other presentations he gave during the last two decades of his life.

Born in New York City in 1945, Richard attended Columbia University, from which he received a B.A. in Russian with a concentration in music, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in music. After graduating in 1976 with a dissertation on Russian opera in the 1860s, he joined the music department as a faculty member. During his time in New York, he conducted the choral group Cappella Nova and played viola da gamba with multiple early music bands, particularly the Aulos Ensemble. UC Berkeley’s music department hired him as an associate professor in 1987, and he settled in nearby El Cerrito, where he lived with his wife Cathy and his children Paul and Tess. He became the Class of 1955 Professor of Music in 1997 and taught at Berkeley until his retirement in 2014.

Richard was a preeminent figure in the field — prolific in prose, ubiquitous (and vocal) in conference sessions, and alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) inspiring, intimidating, and encouraging in the classroom. He had a strong ethical sense about musicology as a discipline and held members of the profession to exacting standards. He argued passionately that music played vital social roles that needed to be discussed rather than discounted.

Richard’s numerous publications include the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music (2005; in paperback, revised, in 2010), Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996), Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (1993), Opera and Drama in Russia (1981/93), Text and Act (1995), Defining Russia Musically (1997), four other essay collections, dozens of essays for prominent mainstream outlets, and some 160 entries for the New Grove Dictionary of Opera and the New Grove Dictionary of Music, second edition (including the important, pioneering entry on “Nationalism”). His final collection, Musical Lives and Times Examined: Keynotes and Clippings, 2006–2019, is forthcoming. His prolific presence enabled him to serve as a prominent model of public musicology and ultimately earned him the regard of non-specialists for writing in an engaging way about why classical music mattered.

Further, Richard was an unparalleled editor and translator, especially of Russian texts, but also of German and French, among others (see Music in the Western World, ed. with Piero Weiss, two editions, 1984 and 2008). He edited the California Studies in 20th-Century Music series for UC Press, which at the time of his death included twenty-one titles. His career tracked and inspired momentous disciplinary changes as the field shifted from a focus on medieval and Renaissance music to that of the nineteenth century, and then into the musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 2000, he was the only academic included in the BBC Music Magazine’s list of the sixty most powerful figures in present-day music.

Richard’s work received multiple awards from the AMS: the Noah Greenberg Award in 1978; the Alfred Einstein Award in 1980; and the Otto Kinkeldey Award in 1997 and 2006. He was active in AMS governance, including service on the Council, AMS-50 Fellowship Committee, JAMS Editorial Board, Program Committee, and Kinkeldey Committee. In 2010 he was made an honorary member of the AMS. Richard received further honors over the course of his career: the Edward J. Dent Medal from the Royal Music Association and a Guggenheim Fellowship, both in 1986; two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards, in 1997 and 2005; and memberships in the American Philosophical Society, in 1998, and in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 2006. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences made Richard an honorary member in 2016, recognizing his long-term relationship with the musicological community in that country.

But Richard’s most impressive recognition came in 2017, when he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The official commendation described him as “a musicologist and critic of prodigious erudition who has transformed contemporary perspectives on music through historical research and essays that defy conventional critical paradigms.” The Kyoto citation further noted “that, in music, creativity can be found not only in composition and performance, but also in meticulous discourse contextualizing the art.” Richard was the first musicologist to receive the prize, and he felt particularly proud of the recognition (and hence respectability) it bestowed on the field of musicology as a whole.  As Richard’s lengthy lists of accomplishments and honors attest, he was one of the most consequential musicologists of his generation, if not in the history of musicology.

Richard had a reputation for being headstrong (or as his entry in the New Grove Dictionary says “a vigorous, forthright critic”). It is undeniable that he relished engaging in polemics, many of which achieved legendary status in the field. As he himself noted, “my preferred mission in life is not to set agendas but rather to upset them.” Across his career, Richard questioned and disrupted conventional narratives, and took aim at age-old binary oppositions. For him, most historical episodes were not clear cases of either/or, yes or no, but almost without exception both/and: messy, complicated, and complex.

Richard’s unwavering commitment to the integrity of the discipline of musicology was apparent in his teaching, particularly in his graduate seminars, with their seemingly never-ending syllabi. Many of his seminar topics directly corresponded to his scholarly interests of the moment, and inspired many doctoral theses (particularly his seminar on “Music and Nationalism”). He once remarked, “One of the greatest pleasures of my job is reading and line editing my students’ dissertations.” Often pugilistic in public, he was generous in private with his editorial time, both for his students and for others. Despite his oft-stated distinction between his “job” and his “work,” the two were intertwined: on the “job” in the undergraduate classroom he was a charismatic and witty pedagogue whose teaching informed his “work” as a scholar, and vice versa. He told an interviewer in 2014: “The Oxford History is my lectures.” In retirement, Richard remembered fondly the PhD-advising relationship as one of the most meaningful, stimulating aspects of his career. He was especially proud that he had supervised the most dissertations in the history of the UC Berkeley music department.

Since 2013, Richard held something approximating perambulatory office hours at a local dog park, Point Isabel, along the shoreline of the San Francisco Bay, where he became a familiar fixture both because he lacked a dog and because he had a propensity to enthusiastically belt out musical excerpts. He had a steady local roster of walking partners, and any visitor passing through town was invited to join him on his daily route. He was an inveterate, avuncular storyteller of tales from musicology’s olden days, especially “brou-ha-has” (as he would call them), as well as of stories from his own life. He loved telling and hearing jokes, even if he already knew them; while a graduate student, if he met his daily dissertation writing quota, he would call 1-800-dial-a-joke to reward himself with a laugh.

Rather than with a joke (as Richard might have appreciated), we thought this tribute should end with a piece of advice. In On Russian Music, Richard crystallized what had long been his scholarly credo: “There are far worse things one can be than wrong: one can be lazy; one can be incompetent; one can be dishonest. If one is diligent, competent, and honest, one need not fear being wrong” (p. 23). Richard lived this credo in person and in print, trusting in consistent, hard work and robust debate to carry forward our collective understanding of music’s messy past and present.

— Peter Schmelz and Rachel Vandagriff