A Word About Richard Taruskin

I received an e-mail from my parents a couple of weeks ago with the unfortunate news that Prof. Richard Taruskin, the most interesting man in music, had passed away. The message took the form of several articles collected from around the internet and copy-pasted directly into the e-mail. Some were enthusiastic eulogies, some were generally laudatory but with the obligatory reservations on display, and some were the most pathetic kind of petty: the little men yelling about the amount of air Taruskin would suck up in the room. These men are Donnys, and they're missing the Walter Sobchaks in their lives to let them know that, cuss words aside, they’re out of their element.

I do not pretend to objectivity here: Taruskin is one of my favorite authors and, more importantly, he was one of my most beloved teachers. I had the immense privilege of stumbling into his Music History class during my freshman year at Berkeley some eighteen years ago, knowing nothing about him or what he was teaching, thinking only to complete a gen-ed requirement using something that would come easily to me. I was totally unprepared for the lecturer who took the stage—for that is how he saw the front of the classroom—and captured my mind and heart within minutes. His appearance was cartoonishly professorial, without a doubt consciously so: the tweed jacket with elbow patches, the coiffed shock of pianist’s hair, the slightly upturned chin during lectures. His speech had a tinge of the Transatlantic and his cadences were straight from the pages of The New Yorker. This was his permanent role, and he was fantastic.

The thing about Taruskin is that, like Michael Jordan, he could talk the trash because he brought the game. He was at home in any period of western music within the previous millennium from both a theoretical and historical perspective, meaning that he could discuss with equal aplomb the intricacies of the twelve-tone system and the reception of Beethoven’s music in 19th-century Vienna. Fux he read in Latin, the writings of the Mighty Five in Russian. And this, perhaps, was best of all: from this incredible fluency, this swimming in the sea of music, emerged original opinions that Taruskin published and defended with the assuredness of someone who lived there. It matters little that he was mistaken in this or that. The difference between him and his rivals was the difference between a native English speaker and a clever German who’d done fairly well in picking it up as a foreign language but could never quite get past his obsession with the Oxford comma. You know whose opinion you’d want to hear on the sonnets.

So whenever he stood in front of forty undergrads and started to lecture on sonata form or on the evolution of performance practice or whatever, it was a magical experience. When I would awake back in the temporal world of campus I knew that we had all just gotten a rare glimpse of something extremely special. We had been watching someone who was great, truly great in his field, and who loved taking us around and showing off the beautiful hidden corners that only he knew about. There is no doubt Taruskin fed his ego at regular intervals—great talents can hardly be otherwise—but these lectures were not about him in the slightest. He didn’t dare intrude on the beauty of the scenery. He was all guide, all love of the land.

There is more to why I cherish the memory of his class than his brilliance. As my thoughts strayed to Taruskin last week, I picked up my copy of his (together with Piero Weiss) Music in the Western World: A History in Documents. It was our textbook for his class, and this was the first time I’d looked at the book since then. As I’ve come to learn, interacting with objects that were once regular companions and then lay untouched for many years has the effect of smelling a distinct odor associated with a person from the distant past. From the lightest touch and rustle the impressions of that period, locked away in an earlier layer of consciousness, return with a vigor and freshness that is denied to thoughts and memories in continuous use. I picked up the book and, for a few minutes of linear time (which expanded non-linearly into a small lifetime), was a teenager on his way to Music 76.

The years from 18 to 25 were productive years but were a little rough for me, and were punctuated by two periods of special misery: my freshman year at Berkeley and my studies abroad. Perhaps the factor that contributed most was my uniquely forced, primitive reading of my own psyche. Unwilling to grant legitimacy to more than one vision of self, I was forced into a purely hierarchical understanding of my interests: those at the top—or those that I thought should have been at the top—were the real ones, while those at the bottom were harmful distractions and allegedly not stuff I actually cared about. When things didn’t go quite according to this schematic, as they obviously did not, it caused me real pain, which I felt acutely but was again not prepared to recognize.

Berkeley was especially hard in this way because I wasn’t supposed to love it and I did. I absolutely loved it. The taste of independence, the potential of intellectual growth with talented peers, the excitement of exploration, the academic life of the faculty, all of these washed over me like a draught of heady ale. The Campanile with its carillon serenades, the classical architecture of the libraries and of Dwinelle Hall, and especially the little creek, bridge, and overhanging trees just past the music building, filled my heart with a pure and illicit joy. My love of Talmud—which was, indeed, the overpowering force in my life—was supposed to have no rivals, and these alien intrusions had to be suppressed.

It is not difficult to imagine what kind of paralysis took hold of me under these circumstances. A couple of weeks into the semester I had stopped attending classes altogether. The day before an exam I would open the relevant book, slog through the necessary material, and then drag myself to the exam. Otherwise, I spent all my free time on Judaic subjects. I didn’t like this way of doing things—in fact, I hated it—but I just couldn’t summon the strength to do anything else. One prominent exception was Taruskin's music history.

I attended every one of Taruskin's classes without fail, because he had charmed away all my objections. I was under the spell of his lecturing, his book, and the new depths of music to which I was being introduced. I was also under the spell of the Music Library. I cannot say that I found it to be a beautiful structure, as it was an odd rhomboid thing with some kind of grey brick-cum-paneling. On the inside, however, it was both open and cozy, full of light and quietly intimate. It was a treasure trove of interesting music and music literature, and there I could dive into a symphonic score or put on a Brandenburg and experience great calm. Taruskin’s classroom and the Music Library thus became a bipartite refuge in which I could escape the tension that hung over the rest of my day, and enjoy my classes and the reading and this Berkeley which I otherwise was supposed to stay away from.

Ultimately, despite the pain involved, I do not regret resisting Berkeley’s charms (that will have to be for a different post). If I could do it in no other way than the way I did, that is a peculiarity of my young constitution that I could do nothing about and will not complain about today. But the memory of Professor Taruskin’s teaching will remain forever sweet to me, the personal experience of the great scholar always inspiring, and his books a source of joy at every reading.