I was interested in what Charles Rosen has to say about the recently published writings of Richard Taruskin, because Taruskin figures prominently as one of the villains in this book, which I have also been dipping into lately.  I am curious to know what makes Taruskin tick, to discover what makes him so irrationally hostile to the idea that Shostakovich might have been some sort of semi-secret anti-Stalinist, and in general irrationally nasty to anyone who dares to criticise him, Richard Taruskin.

Meanwhile, in response to Taruskin, Rosen says fascinating things about the nature of music, and in particular the nature of some of the world’s greatest music.

Nor does the history of music fit neatly with social history. Of all the arts, music has the greatest kinship with science, even abstract science: Greek and Roman philosophers speculated about the relation of music to mathematics, and in the latter part of the eighteenth century the philosopher and economist Adam Smith remarked that listening to a fine symphony was like contemplating a great scientific system (it took the long development from the monodic Gregorian chant and the gradual emancipation of music from words for this observation to become possible). A musical system has important attributes of a language, like grammar and syntax, although some of the aspects of communication are very rudimentary – that is, you can convey emotion with music, and imitate cuckoos and babbling brooks, but you cannot make a dinner appointment or a train reservation without words. Nevertheless, as the musical system changes over the centuries, possibilities of exploiting the musical language suggest themselves that are too fascinating to ignore, but the works inspired by this stimulus may possibly have to wait a long time for their exploitation. A musical system appears to have a logic of its own that can be inflected but not completely controlled by social pressures; it can act as an inspiration to composers, who often feel as if they were discovering rather than inventing. That is what the greatest of music critics, E.T.A. Hoffmann, conveyed when he wrote that Beethoven was not the wild, untamed genius as so many of his contemporaries thought, but the soberest of all composers, because everything he wrote came from the nature of music itself.

Bach’s great Mass in B minor was never performed during his lifetime: as a Catholic Mass, it could not be played in a Protestant church, and the use of an orchestra was forbidden in Catholic churches during Bach’s lifetime, although he hoped it might eventually be possible. His “Goldberg” Variations is the most successful of all his works in concert performance today, yet the kind of concert in which it can be performed did not exist for another century, and it had to wait for recognition and acclaim for still another hundred years. Both these works fascinated many musicians during the long period before they could find a niche in the social world of performance. The first great set of works to become the staple of serious public piano performances was the thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas: only two of these were played in a concert hall in Vienna during Beethoven’s lifetime. To judge a work, as Taruskin often does, by how it sounded in the conditions that existed when it was written is useful and even necessary, but it can lead at times to profound misunderstanding. This is where the irritating contradiction between the work as written and the work as heard begins to rear its ugly head.

In any case, many works of music like Beethoven’s Great Fugue for String Quartet appear principally as a response to possibilities of the musical system of the time, possibilities that are irrelevant to any kind of contemporary social conditions, and the system itself develops both as a response to social pressures and in ways that are completely independent. No social history of music can succeed that does not acknowledge the partial independence of the musical language, the way it can offer abstract possibilities to the imagination irrelevant to the social and economic world of the musician, but often too tempting to turn down.

Or to put it another way, composers might, were they now reincarnated, be disgusted by “authentic” performances of their music.  “You were doing so well!  Why did you stop?  Why do you now insist on playing my works only in the primitive ways that I was forced to endure, because of lousy musicians, lousy instruments, and stupid interfering politicians and priests?”

Is this argument a clue to Taruskin’s attitude to Shostakovich, and to the picture of Shostakovish presented in Testimony? Has Taruskin invested too much in the idea that composers generally are bound by their times (i.e. by people like Stalin) and cannot escape into a parallel universe of pure music, or for that matter even of musically encoded rebellion?  Is Taruskin, or was he once, a Marxist?  And is he now one of those non-Marxits who is still now more of a Marxist than he now realises?