Taruskin Redux

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:53 AM Eastern on 29 Oct. See below.]

On the basis of this post several people (here and here, for instance) have assumed that I agreed with everything musicologist and music historian Richard Taruskin had to say in his savage, very personal 12000-word Declaration Of Principles (to use a term lifted from Citizen Kane) masquerading as a book review of three recent entries in the Classical Music Is Dead Sweepstakes. As I explained in the comments section of one of those two linked posts, what I agreed with was that portion of Taruskin’s piece that I quoted, leaving unsaid what I thought about other matters commented on by Taruskin in that piece; thoughts left unsaid mostly because I’ve read none of the three books under discussion.

I can, however, say one thing about Taruskin’s notion that some of classical music’s greatest enemies are to be found among its devotees; specifically those who argue for the worth and value of classical music in terms moralistic, character-building, or utilitarian: he’s right. Such champions of classical music need to have their kneecaps broken (figuratively speaking, of course). Any argument for the worth or value of classical music along any of those lines is not only imbecile but destructively wrongheaded and entirely in error. There’s zero moral anything involved with one’s listening preference for classical music or the popular sort, nor will listening to classical music make of one a better person and citizen, and listening to popular music, a reprobate. And arguments along utilitarian lines miss the point altogether and cannot help but obscure the issue in an almost impenetrable cloud of irrelevance.

I do, however, take exception to Taruskin’s somewhat ambiguous,

Belief in [classical music’s] indispensability, or in its cultural superiority, is by now unrecoverable, and those who mount such arguments on its behalf morally indict themselves.

Setting aside Taruskin’s descent into the pseudo-ethical, for which sin he rightly indicts some of the objects of his ire, Is Taruskin saying here that classical music is not indispensable; that it’s not culturally superior to other musics? Or is he merely saying that mounting such arguments in defense of classical music is futile because not persuasive to the legions of non-listeners?

If the latter, he may well be right. But then, that’s no reason to suggest abandoning the arguments, but rather to finding more effective, more compelling ways to argue them. If the former, then Taruskin is on shaky ground, I think, and, further, is guilty of a tendentious disingenuousness into the bargain simply to win an instant point. To argue that classical music is not culturally superior to other musics but is merely their cultural equal is tantamount to arguing that, for instance, the culture of, say, some obscure African tribe barely out of the Stone Age is the equal of our present Western culture; an argument that would be attempted in earnest only by the most rabidly loony multiculturalist. And to argue that classical music is not indispensable to that Western culture would be to deny the incalculable magnitude of the enduring influence some 600 years of classical music has had in the reciprocal shaping of that culture; a shaping influenced but transiently by all other genres of music.

For the author of The Oxford History of Western Music to be guilty of making such arguments — if that in fact is what Taruskin is doing here — is simply reprehensible, and I would have thought unthinkable.

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Update (1:53 AM Eastern on 29 Oct): I see by my eMail that a definition is required here even though I thought my meaning obvious in context.

By the term culture, I am here referring (as I assumed was Taruskin as well) not to civilization as a whole, but to “the intellectual side of civilization” (OED); that side that “concerns itself with arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.” (Webster’s).

I trust this clarification will remove any ambiguity on that point in my above post.