// essays //
Fall 2005
Current Q&A: Richard Taruskin
Susanna Berger
During a recent visit to Columbia University, music professor Richard Taruskin mused, "I used to think of my life as consisting of only three statements: I was born. I learned to walk and talk. I came to Columbia." Professor Taruskin spent 26 years at Columbia University, as an undergraduate (class of '65), a graduate student, and finally a professor. Presently, he is on the faculty of the music department at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of numerous academic honors and is a highly regarded authority in areas which include the theory of performance, Russian music, twentieth-century music, nationalism, and musical modernism. He has recorded widely as a professional viola da gamba player and was the conductor of the Collegium Musicum, the graduate student-led early music chorus at Columbia University. Professor Taruskin has also been a frequent contributor to various publications such as The New York Times andThe New Republic. His publications on Russian music include Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, and Defining Russia Musically. A collection of his newspaper and magazine articles on the topic of performance practice has been published as Text and Act. He recently published a six-volume text, comprising 4,272 pages and 1.25 million words, entitled The Oxford History of Western Music (2005). Professor Taruskin is a provocative scholar whose groundbreaking work on Russian musical repertoires and on music history in general has been exceedingly influential. His recent lecture at Columbia examined varying degrees of censorship and questioned whether modifying musical texts out of sensitivity to audiences might be justified as an act of artistic discretion.
SB: Why did you remain at Columbia University for your entire academic training and early career? Why did you move to Berkeley?
RT: Well, it's the force of inertia; it's easier to stay where you are than to look for a job. I was at Columbia for 26 years, from freshman to associate professor. I thought it was just a stroke of good luck when I was first promoted to professor, but then I was even able to get promoted to tenure, which was difficult for someone inside in those days; and so it was a compliment when it happened. I wasn't looking for another job, I was content where I was; but when I did get a call from Berkeley – ah well, let's just say that was probably the one place I would have considered going to.
SB: Did you take or teach Music Humanities? [Music Humanities, or Masterpieces of Western Music, is the required music history component of Columbia's core curriculum.]
RT: I didn't take it, I "achieved it," meaning I was able to get out of the requirement as a freshman. I taught it every year from 1967 to 1987. I started teaching it when I was only two years out of college.
SB: Why do you think that equivalent courses to Music Humanities are not usually included in other core curricula? Why is music not generally awarded that kind of status in the arts?
RT: There are other places where you can take a music course to fulfill a distribution requirement, but Columbia is the only place I know where it is always required. I think it goes back to Columbia's history–Columbia was the original pioneer in general education. That is, the place that usually claims the credit, namely the University of Chicago, was actually copying Columbia. And so it was always a point of pride; Columbia held onto the core curriculum, you know, when other universities were getting rid of it as a requirement. Now they're all scurrying to get it back and Columbia is sitting pretty I think. We always knew that the fad would pass.
SB: What are your thoughts on the repertoire that is taught in Music Humanities? Do you think it is important to broaden the repertoire, or are the works sufficient as they stand?
RT: It should stay the same, you know why? Because the students don't need to be taught the other stuff [i.e., popular music]! They already know it and should teach it to us. It seems to me that it is more valuable to learn something that you don't already know. And that's one of the things that I've always been skeptical about when it comes to a lot of the pressure to open up the curriculum. Usually it is being opened up to stuff, like popular culture, which is something that people already know.
SB: And how do you feel about teaching non-Western Music in Music Humanities?
RT: I don't know why it should be part of Music Humanities. There is a world music course that you can take instead of Music Humanities. And that is appropriate. I don't think that everyone needs to know Beethoven in order to be considered a genuine member of Homo sapiens. I also don't believe that we should be teaching Beethoven and African music and British pop and everything as if it were all one phenomenon. There are all kinds of different traditions and I think it is very difficult to understand any kind of artifact unless you know something about the tradition. And when you teach everything, the thing you have to omit, then, is any sense of traditions, because you are supposed to be giving a little taste of this, a little taste of that, and it becomes a very superficial survey.
SB: What did you learn as a music historian from your time playing viola da gamba and conducting Collegium Musicum, and what did you learn as a gamba player and conductor from your music history experience?
RT: I started viola da gamba in 1966. That came about in an interesting way. I started graduate school in 1965 and Paul Henry Lang was the main musicologist at Columbia at the time. He knew I played cello, because I had sometimes played for his seminars as an undergraduate. He assigned me to write a paper on the transition from viola da gamba to cello. I actually learned when I did the research for that paper, that there never had really been that transition, it wasn't quite that simple. In the course of doing the research, I thought I'd like to get first-hand experience of the instrument. Since there was somebody in my class in graduate school who played it, I asked her if I could borrow her instrument. I got hooked and from that I got a reputation for being interested in early music, so when it came to assigning the Collegium to someone they assigned it to me. I was the Collegium Musicum director from 1967 till 1973. I really enjoyed it. Because I was also involved in early music performance outside the university, I had lots and lots of friends who played and sang and were eager to join the Collegium to have more performance opportunities. Things were a really big deal for a while. I haven't played viola da gamba for a long time, not since moving to California actually. It all sort of dropped away...I never thought that my writing career would take off the way it did. I never decided "oh, I have to stop playing," but there was just no room for that for a while.
SB: Do you miss playing?
RT: I only miss it when people like you ask me if I miss it. Otherwise I hardly ever think about it, because you know, I have plenty to do.
SB: To what extent do you think all musicologists should study music performance, and performers should study musicology?
RT: I don't think it is ever possible to be too well informed. And it is always a benefit for people who are doing practical work to know a little theory and for people who do theoretical work to know something about practice. It keeps you real.
SB: When looking at a work of art, what is it that the historian does differently than the critic? How is a historian's approach to a work of art different than a critic's?
RT: It is very hard to decide when you are being a historian and when you are being a critic; you're not normally conscious of the distinction when you are just the person facing the work of art. But since I have written criticism and I have written history, I can tell you that when I am writing a history I am not primarily interested in how great the thing is, or how bad the thing is. I try to answer questions, like how did things come about the way they did, why did things happen when they did, and things like that. The answers to historical questions can sometimes come from works that aren't intrinsically all that interesting, but they become interesting because they answer those questions. For example, one might want to learn why it is that we call the early eighteenth-century the baroque and the late eighteenth-century the classical, and why, if you were comparing the two, you'd find many more differences than similarities. So that's an interesting historical question, and it is one to which a whole chapter of my history book is devoted, and it is a difficult question, because the answer lies in a lot of music that nobody is particularly interested in hearing or performing anymore. But, as a historian, you are intensely interested, because it holds the answer to the question "why does Mozart sound so different from Bach." The old question people asked was: what provides the missing link between Bach and Mozart? But it turns out there was no such thing! Bach was part of a dying tradition and Mozart was part of a nascent tradition, and the antecedents of Mozart are not of particular interest to performers or audiences. So as a critic your first reaction to these pieces would be: "Ah, not very interesting!" But as a historian, your first reaction is "Ooh, fascinating!" because it tells you what you want to know.
SB: What do you conceive as the relationship between politics and the writings of historians? Do you feel that your writing as a historian has ever been influenced by the political climate?
RT: Sure, but I couldn't tell you consciously every way that it has been influenced. When I am talking about the way in which the cultural and political environment affects either composers or other historians that I write about, I am aware of being conscious of things of which they were not fully conscious. The composers and historians that I write about weren't fully conscious of the political factors influencing their work. Had they been, this awareness would have paralyzed them. You have to just think about your job. Leave it to others to tell you what your motives were or how you were in fact influenced by all the extraneous factors that impinge upon you. When I write, my main concern is that my subject and my object have to be grammatically linked, and that I have to choose the right word, and that I punctuate correctly–the same things every writer thinks about. Obviously, I am also being influenced by all kinds of factors that I describe when I write, but I don't know what these factors are; that is for others to determine.
SB: What is distinctive about your six-volume history, The Oxford History of Western Music? How does it differ from other histories on the market?
RT: Well I could make that a very simple answer, although it might sound a little bit immodest, but that's okay [laughs]. I think that mine is the only book in English that is truly a history. All the other books that are called music histories are really surveys. The difference between a music history and a music survey is that a music survey tells you, here's the repertoire: Haydn, wrote this many string quartets, this many symphonies, this many piano sonatas, and the same for Mozart, Beethoven, and so on. But it doesn't tell you why Haydn wrote what he did, it doesn't tell you how Haydn's sonatas differ from those of his immediate predecessors or successors, and so on. In order to answer those questions, you have to range into very far fields from the musical texts. You have to go into a lot of research into historical conditions, social conditions, and political and economic conditions, as well as aesthetic ones. And you have to step way, way back from the object that is of primary interest to you. The reason why you are interested in the history is because you are interested in the music, obviously. But to write a real history of music you have to step back from the music and re-approach it, through a kind of funnel, and most music history books don't do that. Most people who want to read music history are really only interested in learning about the repertoire, so a survey serves their purposes. But my job was to make the real history story so interesting, that people who were really mostly interested in the music, not in the history, would still want to read it. That's why the book is so long: it has to take in more than just the musical text, and, in fact, there is a lot of musical text it doesn't even get to, which you will find in other texts. Most of the reviews so far have complained a great deal about what got left out. But something had to be left out to make room for all the stuff that had to go in! And so, what was left out was a lot of the music that usually gets discussed in a survey. But for me the criterion of what to include was not "do I love this piece?" or "do I think my readers will love this piece?" but "what does this piece tell us about the questions that the book primarily addresses?"
SB: When you decided, "I am going to write a multivolume history of Western Music," how did you start when staring at a blank computer screen? Did you make an outline?
RT: Well, first of all, I never decided to write it. I was commissioned to write a one volume music history textbook. When I started to write it turned out that what I really wanted to do was write a book that answered all these questions that no other book had answered. So I had to think up answers to these questions; once you go through all the trouble of thinking up the answers to all these questions, you are not going to keep it to yourself – so it turned into something much, much bigger. The editors kept looking on with trepidation, while I kept on writing and writing and writing. I stopped sending stuff to the editors, because I knew that if I did, they would say ‘wait a second, this is much too long. Cut it back! Cut it back!' I knew that if I ever started worrying about that, I would have to stop writing. So I just wrote, praying all the while that when I got finished people would see that it was interesting, that they would lose themselves in enthusiasm along with me. So the book became what it became through a process of evolution. I never sat down to that blank screen saying: "What am I going to do to write this big history book?" Now we'll see whether people will want to read real music histories. I know that many do, I've had a lot of nice reception, but you can go to my Amazon website and you'll see that my sale figures indicate that the book doesn't sell all that well yet. Of course, the price probably plays a part in that. We'll have to wait and see...
SB: How did you partition music history in your mind as you were doing this? Events? Composers?
RT: Good question, because I very much dislike the traditional or conventional periodization. In fact there are a great deal of arguments in the book against that periodization; for example, where I say we really don't need the word Renaissance for music, so let's not use it anymore. And I try to avoid the words Baroque and Classical, because those words erect artificial barriers between what we think of as different periods.
So, you have to divide somehow, and if you look at the titles of the volumes you will see that I use centuries. The first volume was something I really had to argue about with the publishers, who wanted it to be on "the Beginning" to the sixteenth century. I had to explain that we don't know when "the Beginning" was and we never will. All we know is what remains in written records, so you'll notice that it says "The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century." I am trying to be true to epistemology: we only know what we're able to know. That becomes a subject for discussion in itself: what can we know and how do we know it? We cannot know anything that happened before there were notational systems; we can speculate, we can infer, we can extrapolate, but we only can know music from the time when it starts getting written down. That became my overarching theme for the whole history. You might find it very interesting to read chapter sixty-two called "The Apex," because this is where the literate concept reached its peak. And when I get to that peak of literacy, I begin to re-invoke all the themes that I talked about in the medieval chapters – primarily, what's the difference between an oral culture and a literate culture? It all comes back. So I see this book in terms of underlying themes, rather than in terms of periods.
This is a history of musical literacy, basically. The last chapter of the book contains predictions about the end of literacy. The reviews have made a lot of controversy over that chapter, because when composers read that last chapter, in which I say the end of the literate period of music history is coming, they think I mean it's coming next Tuesday [laughs]. So they get fairly uptight. Of course what I really mean is: it's going to go out the way it came in, as a very gradual process, alongside other modes of transmission and dissemination. There was an oral tradition, and literacy joined it and never completely supplanted it; even now there is still such a thing as an oral tradition in music, but now literacy is being joined by a post-literate mode, the digital technology in things.
SB: When you were dividing music history into five volumes, why did you devote two of them to the twentieth century?
RT: Well, as you notice, every century takes more space than the succeeding one: two volumes for the twentieth century, one volume for the nineteenth, one volume containing the seventeenth and eighteenth, and one volume containing everything up to the sixteenth. The reason for that is pretty obvious: there is more material the later you get. Something I noticed in the very beginning of teaching music history is that everybody's account of Medieval music will be pretty similar to everybody else's account, because there is just enough knowledge to fill a sentence. Interpretations differ–there are traditional interpretations and avant-garde interpretations–but what there is to study is very limited. And as we get later and later the sources become much more abundant. The difference between the twentieth century and every other century has been mass media: there is just so much information.
SB: You title the first chapter of your last volume "Starting from Scratch," and it addresses music after World War II. It is traditional to divide the history of art between the periods before World War II and after World War II. How does this division manifest itself in the arts?
RT: For me it means something else, because I was born in April 1945. And pre-War means before I was alive, and post-War means I was there! So for me, that's the difference. Of course I realize everybody else looks at it that way too. That's another reason why I get so much more detailed and my own personal recollections form part of the story in the last volume. And there is something else you might find interesting: as you know I write criticism as well as history (we talked about that already), so sometimes I quote myself as a critic. If you look at those instances where I am quoting myself as a critic, you'll see that those quotes are engaged, those quotes say, the piece is wonderful, or the piece is terrible. Then, as historian, I step back and talk about what this critic said and try to evaluate it culturally. I am putting on two hats, treating myself as a historical agent. If you want to see what the difference is between a critic and a historian, this would be a good way: take a look at the way I treat my own critical writing. Critical writing has an immediacy, as a reaction to ongoing events, which historical writing doesn't have. Historical writing tries to be distant, tries to be a little more dispassionate. You know, I don't think the word objective is totally meaningless in the way a lot of people do. You try to be a neutral reporter as a historian. Can you ever actually achieve that fully? No. There are so many things that you can never actually fully achieve, but that you nevertheless have to try to do. Historians are neutral reporters, though we're always a bit biased, even in ways we'll never know. But we certainly still make rules to regulate our behavior towards neutrality.
SB: Looking back at your older work do you ever notice a bias in your writings?
RT: I tend to look back and see how poorly I wrote. Well, it is hard to say actually because, again, I write in two modes, and there is a certain intermixture between them. I know that when people review my work as a historian they are always saying I'm a little too passionate, a little too partisan. I suppose I am never fully in control of that, as nobody is ever fully in control of himself. All I can say is that I think I have been getting more and more able to be the kind of neutral reporter a historian should be, as I've gotten more experience.
SB: What do you think is the situation of classical art music today, and do you want your book to change this situation in any way?
RT: Classical music is not doing too well these days and it'd be nice if my book changed the situation [laughs]. You know the old expression tout comprendre, c'est tout pardoner. Maybe that will apply. Classical music has taken some missteps in the twentieth century. I discuss, starting in chapter 40, a certain philosophy of history that sees musical style as progressing, according to its own laws; that's what you call ‘autonomous' art. And that the purpose of composing is to further the history of the art. All of this has cost serious musical art in terms of audience appeal. And I think the difference between what we call modernism and what we call postmodernism has to do with coming to terms with that unintended and bad side effect. There are a lot of critics and some historians who try to justify that widening gulf between creators and consumers of music. Ever read anything by Theodor Adorno? [laughs] Well he's one of those who justifies the reasons for the unpopularity of serious music. But I think that is just rationalization after the fact. The reason for the gulf has to do with a bad ideology, which originated in Germany, a country that has had a lot of bad ideologies. I think it is incredible that here we are hitting the 21st century and we're still trying to salvage "good German ideology," after we've all seen what's happened in terms of the bad ideologies. The twentieth century was all full of utopian ideologies, in a lot of forms, some forms that thought of themselves as antagonistic, which nowadays we tend to look back on as variants of the same idea, namely communism and fascism. Well, I think we have to give up with utopianism. If we give up utopianism, then we will end up with a more viable musical life. Serious art is the last bastion of utopianism today in my opinion.
SB: To what extent have composers stopped thinking of art as an autonomous teleological force?
RT: To a large extent composers have stopped thinking of it that way. I'm not a voice in the wilderness anymore. Postmodernism in music has to do with seeing a composer more as a person who is living in society, not living at odds with society or somehow outside society–as if that were possible–and creating music for an audience, rather than creating music for history. In chapter 64, I framed the big question of the twentieth century–as far as musical aesthetics is concerned–this way: "do composers live in history, or do they live in society?" Of course if you ask that question literally it is a silly question, but if you think about it in terms of what is their primary allegiance, then the question makes a lot of sense. The modernist view would be that composers live primarily in history; the un-modernist view, you can call it pre or postmodernist, is that they live primarily in society.
SB: Do you believe these ideologies have been equally destructive for the visual arts as they have been for music?
RT: No! Those lucky artists! And you know why? Because art has monetary value. If you are a famous artist, then your painting is worth a fortune and people will want to collect it, and even put up with having it on their wall, if it is sufficiently valuable [laughs]. So art has flourished. In fact, if I wanted to make a historical generalization of the kind that I usually make fun of, I would say that the nineteenth century was the music century and that the twentieth century was the painting and sculpture century, in terms of dominance in the arts.
SB: What about literature?
RT: Well, there is always literature. But literature has an ambiguous status within the arts, because it uses the same language as ordinary discourse, the same semantics as ordinary discourse. And when artists tried to accentuate the difference between the language of art and the language of ordinary discourse, that effort produced the successful modernist tendencies in literature. There were some great literary modernists, most of whom flourished around the 1920s and 30s – James Joyce, T.S. Elliot – using language in radically different ways from the way you would use it in ordinary speech. But look at novelists today: their language is the normal language. And those who are still trying to do literary experiments to make literature more like the other arts, the non-verbal arts, look a little strange and old-fashioned today. It is very odd, because the very ideas that made art "new" 80 years ago are now very old-fashioned, though people who adhere to them still call them "new." So what you really hear people arguing about nowadays, in music as much as anywhere else, is between different concepts of what "new" music is. Some of them are arguing for a concept of new music that really is old by now.
SB: What would you consider to be "new" music?
RT: The earliest style that I identify in the book as being postmodern was minimalism. So minimalism and all the artistic trends that have begun since have a concept of the "new," which is truly "new." For the stuff that begins around the time of WWI, the modernism of those days, there are still proponents of it, still adherents to it, but their concept of "new" is very old now.
SB: Do you have a final message to share with Columbia students?
RT: Yes, remember that I was once there! Remember my professors Paul Henry Lang, Edward McDowell, and Joel Newman; find something out about the history of the music department. And give my regards to Anahid Ajemian, who still teaches chamber music at Columbia. I remember her from when she was in the Composer's Quartet, and I remember all the records she made with her sister, so I am a great admirer of hers.
SB: Why did you remain at Columbia University for your entire academic training and early career? Why did you move to Berkeley?
RT: Well, it's the force of inertia; it's easier to stay where you are than to look for a job. I was at Columbia for 26 years, from freshman to associate professor. I thought it was just a stroke of good luck when I was first promoted to professor, but then I was even able to get promoted to tenure, which was difficult for someone inside in those days; and so it was a compliment when it happened. I wasn't looking for another job, I was content where I was; but when I did get a call from Berkeley – ah well, let's just say that was probably the one place I would have considered going to.
SB: Did you take or teach Music Humanities? [Music Humanities, or Masterpieces of Western Music, is the required music history component of Columbia's core curriculum.]
RT: I didn't take it, I "achieved it," meaning I was able to get out of the requirement as a freshman. I taught it every year from 1967 to 1987. I started teaching it when I was only two years out of college.
SB: Why do you think that equivalent courses to Music Humanities are not usually included in other core curricula? Why is music not generally awarded that kind of status in the arts?
RT: There are other places where you can take a music course to fulfill a distribution requirement, but Columbia is the only place I know where it is always required. I think it goes back to Columbia's history–Columbia was the original pioneer in general education. That is, the place that usually claims the credit, namely the University of Chicago, was actually copying Columbia. And so it was always a point of pride; Columbia held onto the core curriculum, you know, when other universities were getting rid of it as a requirement. Now they're all scurrying to get it back and Columbia is sitting pretty I think. We always knew that the fad would pass.
SB: What are your thoughts on the repertoire that is taught in Music Humanities? Do you think it is important to broaden the repertoire, or are the works sufficient as they stand?
RT: It should stay the same, you know why? Because the students don't need to be taught the other stuff [i.e., popular music]! They already know it and should teach it to us. It seems to me that it is more valuable to learn something that you don't already know. And that's one of the things that I've always been skeptical about when it comes to a lot of the pressure to open up the curriculum. Usually it is being opened up to stuff, like popular culture, which is something that people already know.
SB: And how do you feel about teaching non-Western Music in Music Humanities?
RT: I don't know why it should be part of Music Humanities. There is a world music course that you can take instead of Music Humanities. And that is appropriate. I don't think that everyone needs to know Beethoven in order to be considered a genuine member of Homo sapiens. I also don't believe that we should be teaching Beethoven and African music and British pop and everything as if it were all one phenomenon. There are all kinds of different traditions and I think it is very difficult to understand any kind of artifact unless you know something about the tradition. And when you teach everything, the thing you have to omit, then, is any sense of traditions, because you are supposed to be giving a little taste of this, a little taste of that, and it becomes a very superficial survey.
SB: What did you learn as a music historian from your time playing viola da gamba and conducting Collegium Musicum, and what did you learn as a gamba player and conductor from your music history experience?
RT: I started viola da gamba in 1966. That came about in an interesting way. I started graduate school in 1965 and Paul Henry Lang was the main musicologist at Columbia at the time. He knew I played cello, because I had sometimes played for his seminars as an undergraduate. He assigned me to write a paper on the transition from viola da gamba to cello. I actually learned when I did the research for that paper, that there never had really been that transition, it wasn't quite that simple. In the course of doing the research, I thought I'd like to get first-hand experience of the instrument. Since there was somebody in my class in graduate school who played it, I asked her if I could borrow her instrument. I got hooked and from that I got a reputation for being interested in early music, so when it came to assigning the Collegium to someone they assigned it to me. I was the Collegium Musicum director from 1967 till 1973. I really enjoyed it. Because I was also involved in early music performance outside the university, I had lots and lots of friends who played and sang and were eager to join the Collegium to have more performance opportunities. Things were a really big deal for a while. I haven't played viola da gamba for a long time, not since moving to California actually. It all sort of dropped away...I never thought that my writing career would take off the way it did. I never decided "oh, I have to stop playing," but there was just no room for that for a while.
SB: Do you miss playing?
RT: I only miss it when people like you ask me if I miss it. Otherwise I hardly ever think about it, because you know, I have plenty to do.
SB: To what extent do you think all musicologists should study music performance, and performers should study musicology?
RT: I don't think it is ever possible to be too well informed. And it is always a benefit for people who are doing practical work to know a little theory and for people who do theoretical work to know something about practice. It keeps you real.
SB: When looking at a work of art, what is it that the historian does differently than the critic? How is a historian's approach to a work of art different than a critic's?
RT: It is very hard to decide when you are being a historian and when you are being a critic; you're not normally conscious of the distinction when you are just the person facing the work of art. But since I have written criticism and I have written history, I can tell you that when I am writing a history I am not primarily interested in how great the thing is, or how bad the thing is. I try to answer questions, like how did things come about the way they did, why did things happen when they did, and things like that. The answers to historical questions can sometimes come from works that aren't intrinsically all that interesting, but they become interesting because they answer those questions. For example, one might want to learn why it is that we call the early eighteenth-century the baroque and the late eighteenth-century the classical, and why, if you were comparing the two, you'd find many more differences than similarities. So that's an interesting historical question, and it is one to which a whole chapter of my history book is devoted, and it is a difficult question, because the answer lies in a lot of music that nobody is particularly interested in hearing or performing anymore. But, as a historian, you are intensely interested, because it holds the answer to the question "why does Mozart sound so different from Bach." The old question people asked was: what provides the missing link between Bach and Mozart? But it turns out there was no such thing! Bach was part of a dying tradition and Mozart was part of a nascent tradition, and the antecedents of Mozart are not of particular interest to performers or audiences. So as a critic your first reaction to these pieces would be: "Ah, not very interesting!" But as a historian, your first reaction is "Ooh, fascinating!" because it tells you what you want to know.
SB: What do you conceive as the relationship between politics and the writings of historians? Do you feel that your writing as a historian has ever been influenced by the political climate?
RT: Sure, but I couldn't tell you consciously every way that it has been influenced. When I am talking about the way in which the cultural and political environment affects either composers or other historians that I write about, I am aware of being conscious of things of which they were not fully conscious. The composers and historians that I write about weren't fully conscious of the political factors influencing their work. Had they been, this awareness would have paralyzed them. You have to just think about your job. Leave it to others to tell you what your motives were or how you were in fact influenced by all the extraneous factors that impinge upon you. When I write, my main concern is that my subject and my object have to be grammatically linked, and that I have to choose the right word, and that I punctuate correctly–the same things every writer thinks about. Obviously, I am also being influenced by all kinds of factors that I describe when I write, but I don't know what these factors are; that is for others to determine.
SB: What is distinctive about your six-volume history, The Oxford History of Western Music? How does it differ from other histories on the market?
RT: Well I could make that a very simple answer, although it might sound a little bit immodest, but that's okay [laughs]. I think that mine is the only book in English that is truly a history. All the other books that are called music histories are really surveys. The difference between a music history and a music survey is that a music survey tells you, here's the repertoire: Haydn, wrote this many string quartets, this many symphonies, this many piano sonatas, and the same for Mozart, Beethoven, and so on. But it doesn't tell you why Haydn wrote what he did, it doesn't tell you how Haydn's sonatas differ from those of his immediate predecessors or successors, and so on. In order to answer those questions, you have to range into very far fields from the musical texts. You have to go into a lot of research into historical conditions, social conditions, and political and economic conditions, as well as aesthetic ones. And you have to step way, way back from the object that is of primary interest to you. The reason why you are interested in the history is because you are interested in the music, obviously. But to write a real history of music you have to step back from the music and re-approach it, through a kind of funnel, and most music history books don't do that. Most people who want to read music history are really only interested in learning about the repertoire, so a survey serves their purposes. But my job was to make the real history story so interesting, that people who were really mostly interested in the music, not in the history, would still want to read it. That's why the book is so long: it has to take in more than just the musical text, and, in fact, there is a lot of musical text it doesn't even get to, which you will find in other texts. Most of the reviews so far have complained a great deal about what got left out. But something had to be left out to make room for all the stuff that had to go in! And so, what was left out was a lot of the music that usually gets discussed in a survey. But for me the criterion of what to include was not "do I love this piece?" or "do I think my readers will love this piece?" but "what does this piece tell us about the questions that the book primarily addresses?"
SB: When you decided, "I am going to write a multivolume history of Western Music," how did you start when staring at a blank computer screen? Did you make an outline?
RT: Well, first of all, I never decided to write it. I was commissioned to write a one volume music history textbook. When I started to write it turned out that what I really wanted to do was write a book that answered all these questions that no other book had answered. So I had to think up answers to these questions; once you go through all the trouble of thinking up the answers to all these questions, you are not going to keep it to yourself – so it turned into something much, much bigger. The editors kept looking on with trepidation, while I kept on writing and writing and writing. I stopped sending stuff to the editors, because I knew that if I did, they would say ‘wait a second, this is much too long. Cut it back! Cut it back!' I knew that if I ever started worrying about that, I would have to stop writing. So I just wrote, praying all the while that when I got finished people would see that it was interesting, that they would lose themselves in enthusiasm along with me. So the book became what it became through a process of evolution. I never sat down to that blank screen saying: "What am I going to do to write this big history book?" Now we'll see whether people will want to read real music histories. I know that many do, I've had a lot of nice reception, but you can go to my Amazon website and you'll see that my sale figures indicate that the book doesn't sell all that well yet. Of course, the price probably plays a part in that. We'll have to wait and see...
SB: How did you partition music history in your mind as you were doing this? Events? Composers?
RT: Good question, because I very much dislike the traditional or conventional periodization. In fact there are a great deal of arguments in the book against that periodization; for example, where I say we really don't need the word Renaissance for music, so let's not use it anymore. And I try to avoid the words Baroque and Classical, because those words erect artificial barriers between what we think of as different periods.
So, you have to divide somehow, and if you look at the titles of the volumes you will see that I use centuries. The first volume was something I really had to argue about with the publishers, who wanted it to be on "the Beginning" to the sixteenth century. I had to explain that we don't know when "the Beginning" was and we never will. All we know is what remains in written records, so you'll notice that it says "The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century." I am trying to be true to epistemology: we only know what we're able to know. That becomes a subject for discussion in itself: what can we know and how do we know it? We cannot know anything that happened before there were notational systems; we can speculate, we can infer, we can extrapolate, but we only can know music from the time when it starts getting written down. That became my overarching theme for the whole history. You might find it very interesting to read chapter sixty-two called "The Apex," because this is where the literate concept reached its peak. And when I get to that peak of literacy, I begin to re-invoke all the themes that I talked about in the medieval chapters – primarily, what's the difference between an oral culture and a literate culture? It all comes back. So I see this book in terms of underlying themes, rather than in terms of periods.
This is a history of musical literacy, basically. The last chapter of the book contains predictions about the end of literacy. The reviews have made a lot of controversy over that chapter, because when composers read that last chapter, in which I say the end of the literate period of music history is coming, they think I mean it's coming next Tuesday [laughs]. So they get fairly uptight. Of course what I really mean is: it's going to go out the way it came in, as a very gradual process, alongside other modes of transmission and dissemination. There was an oral tradition, and literacy joined it and never completely supplanted it; even now there is still such a thing as an oral tradition in music, but now literacy is being joined by a post-literate mode, the digital technology in things.
SB: When you were dividing music history into five volumes, why did you devote two of them to the twentieth century?
RT: Well, as you notice, every century takes more space than the succeeding one: two volumes for the twentieth century, one volume for the nineteenth, one volume containing the seventeenth and eighteenth, and one volume containing everything up to the sixteenth. The reason for that is pretty obvious: there is more material the later you get. Something I noticed in the very beginning of teaching music history is that everybody's account of Medieval music will be pretty similar to everybody else's account, because there is just enough knowledge to fill a sentence. Interpretations differ–there are traditional interpretations and avant-garde interpretations–but what there is to study is very limited. And as we get later and later the sources become much more abundant. The difference between the twentieth century and every other century has been mass media: there is just so much information.
SB: You title the first chapter of your last volume "Starting from Scratch," and it addresses music after World War II. It is traditional to divide the history of art between the periods before World War II and after World War II. How does this division manifest itself in the arts?
RT: For me it means something else, because I was born in April 1945. And pre-War means before I was alive, and post-War means I was there! So for me, that's the difference. Of course I realize everybody else looks at it that way too. That's another reason why I get so much more detailed and my own personal recollections form part of the story in the last volume. And there is something else you might find interesting: as you know I write criticism as well as history (we talked about that already), so sometimes I quote myself as a critic. If you look at those instances where I am quoting myself as a critic, you'll see that those quotes are engaged, those quotes say, the piece is wonderful, or the piece is terrible. Then, as historian, I step back and talk about what this critic said and try to evaluate it culturally. I am putting on two hats, treating myself as a historical agent. If you want to see what the difference is between a critic and a historian, this would be a good way: take a look at the way I treat my own critical writing. Critical writing has an immediacy, as a reaction to ongoing events, which historical writing doesn't have. Historical writing tries to be distant, tries to be a little more dispassionate. You know, I don't think the word objective is totally meaningless in the way a lot of people do. You try to be a neutral reporter as a historian. Can you ever actually achieve that fully? No. There are so many things that you can never actually fully achieve, but that you nevertheless have to try to do. Historians are neutral reporters, though we're always a bit biased, even in ways we'll never know. But we certainly still make rules to regulate our behavior towards neutrality.
SB: Looking back at your older work do you ever notice a bias in your writings?
RT: I tend to look back and see how poorly I wrote. Well, it is hard to say actually because, again, I write in two modes, and there is a certain intermixture between them. I know that when people review my work as a historian they are always saying I'm a little too passionate, a little too partisan. I suppose I am never fully in control of that, as nobody is ever fully in control of himself. All I can say is that I think I have been getting more and more able to be the kind of neutral reporter a historian should be, as I've gotten more experience.
SB: What do you think is the situation of classical art music today, and do you want your book to change this situation in any way?
RT: Classical music is not doing too well these days and it'd be nice if my book changed the situation [laughs]. You know the old expression tout comprendre, c'est tout pardoner. Maybe that will apply. Classical music has taken some missteps in the twentieth century. I discuss, starting in chapter 40, a certain philosophy of history that sees musical style as progressing, according to its own laws; that's what you call ‘autonomous' art. And that the purpose of composing is to further the history of the art. All of this has cost serious musical art in terms of audience appeal. And I think the difference between what we call modernism and what we call postmodernism has to do with coming to terms with that unintended and bad side effect. There are a lot of critics and some historians who try to justify that widening gulf between creators and consumers of music. Ever read anything by Theodor Adorno? [laughs] Well he's one of those who justifies the reasons for the unpopularity of serious music. But I think that is just rationalization after the fact. The reason for the gulf has to do with a bad ideology, which originated in Germany, a country that has had a lot of bad ideologies. I think it is incredible that here we are hitting the 21st century and we're still trying to salvage "good German ideology," after we've all seen what's happened in terms of the bad ideologies. The twentieth century was all full of utopian ideologies, in a lot of forms, some forms that thought of themselves as antagonistic, which nowadays we tend to look back on as variants of the same idea, namely communism and fascism. Well, I think we have to give up with utopianism. If we give up utopianism, then we will end up with a more viable musical life. Serious art is the last bastion of utopianism today in my opinion.
SB: To what extent have composers stopped thinking of art as an autonomous teleological force?
RT: To a large extent composers have stopped thinking of it that way. I'm not a voice in the wilderness anymore. Postmodernism in music has to do with seeing a composer more as a person who is living in society, not living at odds with society or somehow outside society–as if that were possible–and creating music for an audience, rather than creating music for history. In chapter 64, I framed the big question of the twentieth century–as far as musical aesthetics is concerned–this way: "do composers live in history, or do they live in society?" Of course if you ask that question literally it is a silly question, but if you think about it in terms of what is their primary allegiance, then the question makes a lot of sense. The modernist view would be that composers live primarily in history; the un-modernist view, you can call it pre or postmodernist, is that they live primarily in society.
SB: Do you believe these ideologies have been equally destructive for the visual arts as they have been for music?
RT: No! Those lucky artists! And you know why? Because art has monetary value. If you are a famous artist, then your painting is worth a fortune and people will want to collect it, and even put up with having it on their wall, if it is sufficiently valuable [laughs]. So art has flourished. In fact, if I wanted to make a historical generalization of the kind that I usually make fun of, I would say that the nineteenth century was the music century and that the twentieth century was the painting and sculpture century, in terms of dominance in the arts.
SB: What about literature?
RT: Well, there is always literature. But literature has an ambiguous status within the arts, because it uses the same language as ordinary discourse, the same semantics as ordinary discourse. And when artists tried to accentuate the difference between the language of art and the language of ordinary discourse, that effort produced the successful modernist tendencies in literature. There were some great literary modernists, most of whom flourished around the 1920s and 30s – James Joyce, T.S. Elliot – using language in radically different ways from the way you would use it in ordinary speech. But look at novelists today: their language is the normal language. And those who are still trying to do literary experiments to make literature more like the other arts, the non-verbal arts, look a little strange and old-fashioned today. It is very odd, because the very ideas that made art "new" 80 years ago are now very old-fashioned, though people who adhere to them still call them "new." So what you really hear people arguing about nowadays, in music as much as anywhere else, is between different concepts of what "new" music is. Some of them are arguing for a concept of new music that really is old by now.
SB: What would you consider to be "new" music?
RT: The earliest style that I identify in the book as being postmodern was minimalism. So minimalism and all the artistic trends that have begun since have a concept of the "new," which is truly "new." For the stuff that begins around the time of WWI, the modernism of those days, there are still proponents of it, still adherents to it, but their concept of "new" is very old now.
SB: Do you have a final message to share with Columbia students?
RT: Yes, remember that I was once there! Remember my professors Paul Henry Lang, Edward McDowell, and Joel Newman; find something out about the history of the music department. And give my regards to Anahid Ajemian, who still teaches chamber music at Columbia. I remember her from when she was in the Composer's Quartet, and I remember all the records she made with her sister, so I am a great admirer of hers.
Susanna Berger is a junior majoring in Philosophy and concentrating in Art History. She plays viola in the string quartet Cicero, which has performed at Weill Hall in Carnegie Hall and in Steinway Hall and which is coached by Anahid Ajemian. Susanna is the Arts and Literary Editor of The Current.