Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices

by Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin’s sweeping collection of essays distills a half century of professional experience, demonstrating an unparalleled insider awareness of relevant debates in all areas of music studies, including historiography and criticism, representation and aesthetics, musical and professional politics, and the sociology of taste. Cursed Questions, invoking a famous catchphrase from Russian intellectual history, grapples with questions that are never finally answered but never go away. The writings gathered here form an intellectual biography that showcases the characteristic wit, provocation, and erudition that readers have come to expect from Taruskin, making it an essential volume for anyone interested in music, politics, and the arts.

Genres: Music

462 pages, Hardcover

Published April 21, 2020

Reviews

[Bill FromPA]

Somewhere in the middle of the fourth essay, I started to wonder why Taruskin never seemed to comment directly about any piece of music or performance. He had plenty to say, almost always critical, about verbal statements made by composers, performers, and musicologists, but never engaged directly with the "music itself" (a phrase he occasionally mocks). Could it be that, as he accuses Kant, he actually has a tin ear? (This suspicion was eventually dispelled as I read further.)

It turns out that this reticence about making direct judgments about music may be something of a professional characteristic. This is revealed in the opening sentence of Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's essay "The Good, the Bad , and the Boring" in Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music:

Considering how readily musicologists criticize one another – witness the merciless footnotes (and reviews) of so many books and articles – the innocent bystander must find it strange that they remain unwilling to venture judgments about the quality of music around whivh they work.