Bring Me the Head of Richard Taruskin

So I’ve been following The Taruskin Challenge, wherein “two grad students blog their way through the most monumental musicological work in generations”— Richard Taruskin’s 6-volume, 4,154-page Oxford History of Western Music. The grad students behind it, Mark Samples and Zach Wallmark, write engaging, open entries loaded with handy YouTube clips to make points about a work I’m never in this lifetime going to read.

They did get me to read though Taruskin’s new On Russian Music, where he says something about Chaikovsky that’s almost exactly what I think I’ve been trying to say here about poetry. (He’s defending Yevgeny Onegin from Nabokov’s charge that the opera “insults” Pushkin’s story):

“To express the passions and spontaneous reactions of the characters by means of stereotyped melodic and harmonic figures, however freshly and virtuousically recombined, makes exactly the same point Pushkin makes in his novel: feelings are never truly spontaneous but always mediated by the conventions and constraints, as often learned from literature as from “life,” to which we have adapted. Therein lie both the tragedy (the constraints) and the salvation (the adaptation) of human society.”

—from Richard Taruskin, “Chaikovsky and the Literary Folk: A Study in Misplaced Derision”