Richard Taruskin
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520249776
- eISBN:
- 9780520942790
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520249776.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Theory, Analysis, Composition
This book gathers the author's writing on the arts and politics, ranging in approach from occasional pieces for major newspapers such as the New York Times to full-scale critical essays for leading ...
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This book gathers the author's writing on the arts and politics, ranging in approach from occasional pieces for major newspapers such as the New York Times to full-scale critical essays for leading intellectual journals. The works presented in this book consider contemporary composition and performance, the role of critics and historians in the life of the arts, and the fraught terrain where ethics and aesthetics interact and at times conflict. Many of the works collected here have themselves excited wide debate, including the title chapter, which considers the rights and obligations of artists in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a series of postscripts written especially for this volume, the book addresses the debates which was stirred up by the author by his insisting that art is not a utopian escape and that artists inhabit the same world as the rest of society. Among the book's forty-two chapters are two public addresses—one about the prospects for classical music at the end of the second millennium C. E., the other a revisiting of the performance issues previously discussed in the author's Text and Act (1995)—that appear in print for the first time.Less
This book gathers the author's writing on the arts and politics, ranging in approach from occasional pieces for major newspapers such as the New York Times to full-scale critical essays for leading intellectual journals. The works presented in this book consider contemporary composition and performance, the role of critics and historians in the life of the arts, and the fraught terrain where ethics and aesthetics interact and at times conflict. Many of the works collected here have themselves excited wide debate, including the title chapter, which considers the rights and obligations of artists in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a series of postscripts written especially for this volume, the book addresses the debates which was stirred up by the author by his insisting that art is not a utopian escape and that artists inhabit the same world as the rest of society. Among the book's forty-two chapters are two public addresses—one about the prospects for classical music at the end of the second millennium C. E., the other a revisiting of the performance issues previously discussed in the author's Text and Act (1995)—that appear in print for the first time.
