[Ralph P. Locke]

Dear Members of the Humanities Commons\’s AMS Forum:

I just learned that Richard Taruskin has died at 77 of esophageal cancer.

I had no idea he was ill. He and I corresponded from time to time, but less so recently.

People will have all kinds of things to say about RT (as he was known to his Berkeley students, I believe). It\’s all contradictory, and probably all true.

There were many sides to him. What I valued most was his insistence that music and music-making be understood in their societal and cultural contexts. This seemed a near-revelation to many of us who had been trained in the highly positivistic methodologies that American musicology tended to value in the 1960s-70s.

My own work, pushed in roughly the same direction as his, namely toward contextual study. As a result, he tended to treat me as some kind of natural ally, I think. Fortunately, I did not tread on certain specific terrains on which he had very strong (and well-founded, I should stress) opinions, so I didn\’t ever become a target for his ridicule or scorn as some other scholars did.

There\’s a little story I can tell now, which I probably should have told him while I was alive, but I was afraid he wouldn\’t take it well.

Stanley Sadie (in the 1990s) was preparing the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which eventually appeared in 2001.

I told Stanley that I felt there needed, finally, to be entries on Exoticism, Orientalism, and Nationalism. He asked me to write them. I said yes to the first two but said that the third was much more basic and wide-ranging, and that the perfect person was Richard Taruskin. Stanley then asked RT, who said yes. I don\’t know how many words he was asked to write. All I know is that the Nationalism entry ended up being perhaps 20 times as long as my Exoticism and Orientalism entries combined. (Maybe I had obeyed the assigned word length and he hadn\’t. Good for him and for us, his many readers!

I went on to assign RT\’s \”Nationalism\” in seminar after seminar, where I could sense its ability to open the minds of one grad student after another. I think it\’s one article of his that he never anthologized, I guess because it was already available in book form (namely in the multi-volume revised Grove, which of course is now instantly available as and at Oxford Music Online).
I consider the existence of RT\’s \”Nationalism\” article one of my major accomplishments!

(I\’m not saying it\’s my favorite RT article. That might be the one on Norrington\’s recording of Beethoven\’s Ninth. Or the opening chapters in Defining Russia Musically. Or the whole Mussorgsky book. Or….)

Ralph

Ralph P. Locke

Professor Emeritus of Musicology, Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester)

Senior Editor, Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press)Research Affiliate, University of Maryland School of Music

RLocke@esm.rochester.edu

also: Ralph.P.Locke@gmail.com

Short biography and list of published writings: https://www.esm.rochester.edu/faculty/locke_ralph/

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