Taruskin

 I'm reading Richard Taruskin, Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social practices.  UC Press, 2020. He comes up with a critique of allegorical political analyses of harmonic movement very similar to what I came up with, and similar to Charles Rosen's critique of the "new musicology." Taruskin cites Carolyn Abbate, who had coined the turn "low hermeneutics" (or "soft hermeneutics") for this kind of reading. My term for this was the "melodramatic style."  Taruskin uses a passage from Susan McClary, the same musicologist that I used. I think I took this whole discussion out of my book, because it is a tangent, but that is what the blog is for. 

Taruskin and Rosen clashed frequently, with the former's infamous accusation that Rosen's entire literary output is "cold war propaganda." Taruskin rapidly dismisses the one modernist (12 tone) composer I treat in my book, Luigi Nono, saying that it is silly for Schoenberg's son-in-law to be a communist, because a communist regime would not like his music. So this is a bit like Taruskin's coldwar propaganda? Nono used "his father-in-law's advanced compositional techniques to promote a political program that, when successful, invariably resulted in the suppression, as socially parasitical, of audience alienating art like his own." But isn't that an interesting 3rd option? Between formalist 12 tone music in support of American democracy, and Soviet agit-prop music, you can have Eurocommunist 12-tone music as well.  You can call this silly, as RT does, but isn't it just as silly to see 12-tone music or abstract-expressionism as propaganda, just because the CIA promoted these things in an opportunistic way? 

Anyway, I had expected Taruskin to be more supportive of the new musicology, but he concludes that it "quickly took a wrong turn, away from the sociocultural into naive hermeneutics, which caused it to age with stunning rapidity" 436).