another somewhat musical post
Sep. 2nd, 2009 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacOn my trip a while ago up north to confirm locations for the WFC day-trip guide, I made time to stop in at a storefront that's been around for a couple of years. It appeared to be, and in fact is, a record store selling used LPs. How long has it been since I'd seen one of those? (I often pass the site of an excellent one in the City, and every time emit a small whimper that it's no longer there.)
It's mostly a jazz store, but it does have a fair-sized classical section as well. I'm no longer in the market for any specific used LPs in that field, having long since gotten all the obscure works I really wanted that have never been reissued on CD, but a look through might meet my fancy, especially as the prices were cheap. And lo, I found a recording of Brahms's B-flat Sextet, one of my favorite works, by an all-star 50s ensemble including Pablo Casals and Isaac Stern. They don't make names like those any more, and it turns out they don't make swooping, tempo-bending performances like this one any more either.
Next. Some of the music libraries I frequent have acquired copies of Richard Taruskin's new essay collections. The one I have been reading is blandly titled On Russian Music, but it's no less contentious than the one called The Danger of Music. Taruskin is a compelling writer and a brilliant mind who's usually right, but he's exhausting to read in other than short doses, and perusal of the book convinces me that he's also a troll. In the sense that we use the term here on the interwebs. Virtually every reprinted essay is followed by a postscript, gleefully recounting all the completely wrong objections made by readers on first publication and explaining how completely wrong they were. Sometimes this was as much as twenty years ago, and here's Taruskin lurking all that time just waiting for an opportunity to show these people up. Nor are these transgressors ordinary blokes off the street, but noted writers on music, themselves extremely sharp, people whom Taruskin otherwise respects.
Much of the time their flaw, to hear Taruskin tell it, is that they assumed incorrectly that he was saying something that he was coming close to but not actually saying. And one wonders, how many times does this have to happen, with different people - for it happens over and over again - before it would occur to Taruskin that, good writer though he is, maybe he's not making himself entirely clear? And that if your argument is pushing close to a fallacy you wish to avoid, you need to specifically emphasize your avoidance of it, instead of assuming that readers can read your mind as well as your words?
Most amazing was Taruskin's re-opening of the Shostakovich wars. Let us specify that in the factual matters at hand, Taruskin and his more mild-mannered ally Laurel Fay (who did the actual scholarly work here; Taruskin's role was that of "Darwin's bulldog") were completely correct and their antagonists completely wrong and more than a little trollish themselves. Nevertheless it is rather startling to read Taruskin explain that he can say that one of those antagonists "is the very model of a Stalinist critic" and that his "method is precisely what is known in the West as McCarthyism" but that is absolutely not the same thing as calling the man a Stalinist or McCarthyite, not at all! He's not criticizing the man, you see, but only what he did. But what is a Stalinist or a McCarthyite other than a person who does the things associated with those names? Whom does Taruskin think he's kidding here?
If this blog disappears sometime within the foreseeable future and is replaced by a small pile of ashes and a curl of smoke, you'll know that Taruskin came by to read it.
It's mostly a jazz store, but it does have a fair-sized classical section as well. I'm no longer in the market for any specific used LPs in that field, having long since gotten all the obscure works I really wanted that have never been reissued on CD, but a look through might meet my fancy, especially as the prices were cheap. And lo, I found a recording of Brahms's B-flat Sextet, one of my favorite works, by an all-star 50s ensemble including Pablo Casals and Isaac Stern. They don't make names like those any more, and it turns out they don't make swooping, tempo-bending performances like this one any more either.
Next. Some of the music libraries I frequent have acquired copies of Richard Taruskin's new essay collections. The one I have been reading is blandly titled On Russian Music, but it's no less contentious than the one called The Danger of Music. Taruskin is a compelling writer and a brilliant mind who's usually right, but he's exhausting to read in other than short doses, and perusal of the book convinces me that he's also a troll. In the sense that we use the term here on the interwebs. Virtually every reprinted essay is followed by a postscript, gleefully recounting all the completely wrong objections made by readers on first publication and explaining how completely wrong they were. Sometimes this was as much as twenty years ago, and here's Taruskin lurking all that time just waiting for an opportunity to show these people up. Nor are these transgressors ordinary blokes off the street, but noted writers on music, themselves extremely sharp, people whom Taruskin otherwise respects.
Much of the time their flaw, to hear Taruskin tell it, is that they assumed incorrectly that he was saying something that he was coming close to but not actually saying. And one wonders, how many times does this have to happen, with different people - for it happens over and over again - before it would occur to Taruskin that, good writer though he is, maybe he's not making himself entirely clear? And that if your argument is pushing close to a fallacy you wish to avoid, you need to specifically emphasize your avoidance of it, instead of assuming that readers can read your mind as well as your words?
Most amazing was Taruskin's re-opening of the Shostakovich wars. Let us specify that in the factual matters at hand, Taruskin and his more mild-mannered ally Laurel Fay (who did the actual scholarly work here; Taruskin's role was that of "Darwin's bulldog") were completely correct and their antagonists completely wrong and more than a little trollish themselves. Nevertheless it is rather startling to read Taruskin explain that he can say that one of those antagonists "is the very model of a Stalinist critic" and that his "method is precisely what is known in the West as McCarthyism" but that is absolutely not the same thing as calling the man a Stalinist or McCarthyite, not at all! He's not criticizing the man, you see, but only what he did. But what is a Stalinist or a McCarthyite other than a person who does the things associated with those names? Whom does Taruskin think he's kidding here?
If this blog disappears sometime within the foreseeable future and is replaced by a small pile of ashes and a curl of smoke, you'll know that Taruskin came by to read it.
