Richard Taruskin - “Titan” of Universal Musicology. On the Fascination and Imperative of Cursed Questions

Abstract

On the first day of July 2022, the headline of an article in the New York Times officially announced the passing of the great American musicologist Richard Taruskin. The news of the loss of a world-renowned researcher, whose prolific activity changed ancient paradigms of musical thought, constitutes an impetus for the new generations of musicologists of the 21st century in approaching music history and analysis from a new, multi-branched and integrative perspective, constantly adaptable to the reality of our days. The present study aims to systematize and promote the ideas gathered in the last volume published during the author’s lifetime, Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices (2020), which comprises in a condensed form Taruskin’s conceptions regarding the relationship between music, external factors and the other adjacent disciplines (aesthetics, philosophy, sociology).