The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays [Paperback]

The Danger of Musicgathers some two decades of Richard Taruskin's writing on the arts and politics, ranging in approach from occasional pieces for major newspapers such as theNew York Timesto 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 addressesone 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'sText and Act(1995)that appear in print for the first time.

Richard Taruskinis Class of 1955 Chair of Music at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author ofStravinsky and the Russian Traditions(UC Press), among many other books.

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 theNew York Times, mostly
2. Only Time Will Cover the Taint
3. Nationalism: 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 Good HindelÃ4