Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices by Richard Taruskin

Author:Richard Taruskin [Taruskin, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Music, History & Criticism, Philosophy & Social Aspects, Essays, Genres & Styles, Classical, History, Europe, Western, Social History, Philosophy, Social
ISBN: 9780520344280
Google: 97bNDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2020-04-21T20:32:17+00:00

In actual fact, however, neither the style nor the actual use of these instruments has any connection with these different musical civilizations. My aim was rather to enrich the European sound vocabulary by means of non-European listening habits, some of our traditional classical sound combinations having become so charged with “history” that we must open our windows wide in order to avoid being asphyxiated. This reaction of mine has nothing whatever to do with the clumsy appropriation of a “colonial” musical vocabulary as seen in the innumerable short-lived rhapsodies malagaches and rhapsodies cambodgiennes that appeared during the early years of the present century.29

In other words, the non-European sounds are there precisely so as not to bring any extraneous associations to mind (pay no attention to that belly dancer behind the curtain!), the way, say, the use of a string quartet, with all that unwanted historical baggage, might have done. We are thus bidden to follow the old alchemist’s recipe for turning lead into gold (Ready? Melt and stir for three hours without thinking of the word rhinoceros).30 As an example of obedience to Boulez’s puritanical authority one could cite Paul Griffiths, from the revised edition of his study of music after World War II:

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