Shall We Change the Subject? A Music Historian Reflects

In this lecture, Richard Taruskin reflects on the historiography of music and its embrace of a Whiggish paradigm that he argues has had a deleterious effect on the value and practice of music. Taruskin’s extensive work as a scholar and music journalist has earned him the title “America’s national musicologist“ (Der Spiegel). A specialist in Russian and Soviet music, twentieth-century music, the theory of performance, music and politics, and general historiography, Taruskin has authored and edited numerous