Shall We Change the Subject?
A Music Historian Reflects. Part 2
Richard Taruskin
In the second part of this essay (the first one appearing in dissonance 112) Richard Taruskin discusses various issues related to the ethical questions raised by contemporary music practice (with some comparisons to contemporary art and sculpture): drawing on his own personal experience with musicans in USSR and on various cases of debates around censorship (or cancelling) of musical performances, most notably of John Adams’ opera The Death of Klinghoffer, Taruskin stresses how our representation of music practice (and, in particular, our representation of the role and status of composers) is based on the remnants of nineteenth century conceptions of idealized transgression and a systematic overemphasis of the individual to the detriment of the collective.
