Synopses & Reviews
The Danger of Music gathers some two decades of Richard Taruskin'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. Hard-hitting, provocative, and incisive, these essays 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 essay, which considers the rights and obligations of artists in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a series of lively postscripts written especially for this volume, Taruskin, America's "public" musicologist, addresses the debates he has stirred up by 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 essays are two public addressesand#151;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)and#151;that appear in print for the first time.
Review
and#8220;This is a wonderful book.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;This is one of the most important books about music you'll read this year. . . . No one has bridged the gap between music scholarship and mainstream media as virtuosically as Taruskin.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Very entertaining.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;A collection of essays by the fearsomely intelligent Berkeley-based musicologist [offering] a passionately engaging perspective.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Erudite and passionate . . . there is much within this intellectually generous compendium that merits serious and sustained engagement.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;A stimulating book that offers a wide range of topics and ideas.and#8221;
Synopsis
This provocative study asks why we have held on to vivid images of the Nazis' total control of the visual and performing arts, even though research has shown that many artists and their works thrived under Hitler. To answer this question, Pamela M. Potter investigates how historians since 1945 have written about music, art, architecture, theater, film, and dance in Nazi Germany and how their accounts have been colored by politics of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the wish to preserve the idea that true art and politics cannot mix. Potter maintains that although the persecution of Jewish artists and other "enemies of the state" was a high priority for the Third Reich, removing them from German cultural life did not eradicate their artistic legacies. Art of Suppression examines the cultural histories of Nazi Germany to help us understand how the circumstances of exile, the Allied occupation, the Cold War, and the complex meanings of modernism have sustained a distorted and problematic characterization of cultural life during the Third Reich.
Synopsis
In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectualsand#151;including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenbergand#151;who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions.
Weimar on the Pacific is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Dand#246;blin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angelesand#8217;s influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mannand#8217;s Doctor Faustus, Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.
Synopsis
"Ehrhard Bahr's sophisticated introduction to the Los Angeles of the and#233;migrand#233;s from Nazi Germany is a quintessential 'Hollywood' book: brilliant in casting, sunny in disposition, with hidden film noir touches. Bahr's reading of the central books of this world, by Bert Brecht, Thomas Mann, Alfred Dand#246;blin, his insights into Fritz Lang's films and Arnold Schoenberg's operas, make this a major contribution to American, German and world culture."and#151;Sander L. Gilman, author of
Bertolt Brecht's Berlinand#147;At long last, and#233;migrand#233; Los Angeles has been interpreted from the inside by an accomplished scholar of modern German culture. Weimar on the Pacific is a study of relevance to California, the nation, and contemporary Europe.and#8221;and#151;Kevin Starr, Professor of History, University of Southern California
Synopsis
"Taruskin's work is a major contribution to thinking about music in the broadest sense. The book is lucid, powerful, varied, self-aware, and courageous. It is the very best work being done today, not just in musicology, but in any discipline."and#151;Michael Beckerman, author of New Worlds of Dvorand#225;k
About the Author
Richard Taruskin is Class of 1955 Chair of Music at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (UC Press), among many other books.
Table of Contents
Preface: Against Utopia
1. Et in Arcadia Ego; or, I Didn't Know I Was Such a Pessimist until I Wrote This Thing (a talk)
From the New York Times, mostly
2. Only Time Will Cover the Taint
3. and#147;Nationalismand#8221;: Colonialism in Disguise?
4. Why Do They All Hate Horowitz?
5. Optimism amid the Rubble
6. A Survivor from the Teutonic Train Wreck
7. Does Nature Call the Tune?
8. Two Stabs at the Universe
9. In Search of the and#147;Goodand#8221; Hindemith Legacy
10. Six Times Six: A Bach Suite Selection
11. A Beethoven Season?
12. Dispelling the Contagious Wagnerian Mist
13. How Talented Composers Become Useless
14. Making a Stand against Sterility
15. A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the Twenty-first Century
16. Calling All Pundits: No More Predictions!
17. In The Rake's Progress, Love Conquers (Almost) All
18. Markevitch as Icarus
19. Let's Rescue Poor Schumann from His Rescuers
20. Early Music: Truly Old-Fashioned at Last?
21. Bartand#243;k and Stravinsky: Odd Couple Reunited?
22. Wagner's Antichrist Crashes a Pagan Party
23. A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism
24. Corraling a Herd of Musical Mavericks
25. Can We Give Poor Orff a Pass at Last?
26. The Danger of Music and the Case for Control
27. Ezra Pound: A Slim Sound Claim to Musical Immortality
28. Underneath the Dissonance Beat a Brahmsian Heart
29. Enter Boris Goudenow, Just 295 Years Late
For the New Republic, mostly
30. The First Modernist
31. The Dark Side of the Moon
32. Of Kings and Divas
33. The Golden Age of Kitsch
34. No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage
35. Sacred Entertainments
36. The Poietic Fallacy
37. The Musical Mystique: Defending Classical Music against Its Devotees
From the scholarly press
38. Revising Revision
39. Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology
40. She Do the Ring in Different Voices
41. Stravinsky and Us
Envoi
42. Setting Limits (a talk)
Index