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- 2. Inconsistencies and Hypocrisy
Compounding the confusion over Taruskin’s writings is the strikingly different manner he adopts as a ‘historian’ and as a ‘critic’, explained in his Oxford History of Western Music, 2005, Vol. 1, p. xxv: The assertion that Shostakovich’s music reveals him to be a political dissident is only an opinion, as is the opposite claim, that his music shows him to have been a ‘loyal musical son of the Soviet Union’ — as, for that matter, is the alternative claim that his music has no light to shed on the question of his personal political allegiances. [. . .] Espousing a particular position in the debate is no business of the historian. (Some readers may know that I have espoused one as a critic; I would like to think that readers who do not know my position will not discover it here.) But to report the debate in its full range, and draw relevant implications from it, is the historian’s ineluctable duty. Unfortunately, while the distinction between his roles as historian and critic may be perfectly clear in his own mind, others will wonder, which Taruskin are we to believe? Is it the ‘historian’ who in 2005 189 2. Inconsistencies and Hypocrisy Besides passing off gossip and rumor as fact, Taruskin has been strikingly inconsistent with his own views. Perhaps the most glaring of these inconsistencies is his decision to quote a famous passage from Testimony, p. 183, in his Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. IV, pp. 695–96: I think that it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov. It’s as if someone were beating you wih a stick and saying, ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing’, and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering ‘Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing’. What kind of apotheosis is that? You have to be a complete oaf not to hear that. Such a quotation certainly was not necessary and is, in fact, rather shocking given Taruskin’s decades of railing against Volkov and the memoirs. In 1989 he concluded that ‘the reception of Testimony was the greatest critical scandal I have ever witnessed’, that ‘as any proper scholar could plainly see, the book was a fraud’, and that Laurel Fay had ‘meticulously’ tested Testimony’s claims and had ‘absolutely demolished its credibility’. 635 He goes on to warn that ‘even if the authenticity of Testimony could be vindicated, the equally troublesome question of its veracity would remain’ 636 : It is [. . .] understandable, should it ever turn out that Shostakovich was in fact the author of Testimony, that he, who though mercilessly threatened never suffered a dissident’s trials but ended his days as a multiple Hero of Socialist Labour, should have wished, late in life, to portray himself in another light. 637 That is, even if the words did come from Shostakovich’s mouth and were read and approved by the composer, Shostakovich may have been lying through his teeth! Given Taruskin’s history of caution and skepticism towards Testimony — which he has dismissed not only as a ‘fraud’, but a ‘pack of lies and base deceptions’ and a acknowledges, without bias, the opinion that Shostakovich’s ‘music reveals him to be a political dissident’ or the ‘critic’ who for twenty-five years has actively sought to ‘quash this fantasy image’ because ‘there were no dissidents in Stalin’s Russia’ (cf. pp. 54, note 222, and 200, note 662)? Is it the ‘historian’ who in 2005 treats Vladimir Stasov with kid gloves or the ‘critic’ who has lambasted him in multiple books and articles for distorting the true history of Russian music (cf. pp. 201–5)? Apparently, what Taruskin writes depends not only on his audience (‘public’ or ‘academic’), but also on which hat he is wearing at the time. 635 Taruskin, ‘Dictator’, p. 34. Among those deemed by Taruskin not to be ‘proper scholars’ are Gerald Abraham, Detlef Gojowy, and Boris Schwarz, as well as Robert P. Morgan and Leo Treitler, whose revision of Oliver Strunk’s landmark Source Readings in Music History, W. W. Norton, New York, 1998, pp. 1402–6, not only reprints a lengthy excerpt from Testimony, but concludes that ‘Though efforts have been made to discredit this work, most Shostakovich scholars accept the work as authentic’. 636 Ibid., p. 35. 637 In Fanning (ed.), Shostakovich Studies, p. 47. 190 ‘reprehensible book’, whose very ‘citability’ remains in dispute 638 — why, one wonders, does he quote from it in his own magnum opus? Is it possible that this self-proclaimed ‘proper scholar’ now believes the memoirs to be a credible source? No, Taruskin does not quote Testimony because he agrees with it; he quotes it because, in this particular instance, it agrees with him. 639 As noted above, Taruskin will use any source — unsubstantiated gossip, rumor, lies, and even a book that he himself has branded a ‘fraud’ with an ‘absolutely demolished credibility’ — to bolster his case. 640 Taruskin also has been inconsistent, and even hypocritical, in criticizing others who have commented on the meaning of works such as Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony. For Taruskin, such explication is ‘naive, unanswerable, and irrelevant’, and ends up unnecessarily limiting how one perceives a work. 641 He says about the Eleventh, a ‘loud noise from an orchestra is just a loud noise from an orchestra. It doesn’t inherently mean one thing or another’. 642 While it is true that the sounds themselves may have ambiguous meaning, Shostakovich always maintained that those with ‘ears to 638 On Russian Music, pp. 338 and 355. 639 This practice has become common both in print and at professional meetings: to criticize the memoirs, then borrow from it when it supports the writer or speaker’s position. Esti Sheinberg, in Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000, is well aware of the controversy surrounding Testimony, but nevertheless refers to and even quotes from it, usually without qualification, on more than two-dozen pages. Louis Blois, similarly, proclaimed Testimony ‘useless’, ‘a seriously flawed piece of scholarship, and to quote Laurel Fay, merely an annoying inconvenience’ (‘Reflections on Testimony, A Decade Later’, DSCH-list, 13 December 2010), then a day later admitted: I agree that Testimony provides a handy summary of the *true* Shostakovich, the man behind the official mask, the man that lay hidden from the public’s eye for so many decades of an otherwise illustrious career. I have even used Testimony, with disclaimer, in my lectures about Shostakovich for the reason that it offers such a cogent and persuasive set of quotations, of extractable sound-bites, that immediately get the point across to a general audience. In short, it’s a good script, and I admit, useful in that context (‘Re-Reflections on Testimony Many Decades Later’, DSCH-list, 14 December 2010). 640 Taruskin’s justifies this borrowing as follows: The authenticity of Testimony has been seriously questioned, but in the end it is not relevant to the point at issue here, which is the way in which the folk reading has triumphed, both in Russia and abroad, over the official one as Soviet power grew weaker and eventually collapsed. Maybe so, but surely Taruskin could have found something other than this self-described ‘fraud’ to illustrate his point. 641 ‘Shostakovich and the Inhuman: Shostakovich and Us’, Atlantic Monthly; reprinted in Defining Russia Musically, pp. 472–73. 642 In Mitchinson, A Shostakovich Casebook, p. 310; also cf. On Russian Music, p. 307: ‘Guns go bang whether wielded by tsarists or Soviets, and all that Shostakovich had put into his score (that is, into “the music itself”) was the bang’. Elsewhere, Taruskin seems to complain about just the opposite — that is, not reading too much in a piece of music, but too little: In November 2005, enjoying a year’s sabbatical, I dropped in on the national meeting of the Society of Music Theory, an organization of which I am a rather passive member, just to see what was up, and what I saw appalled me. The best-attended papers were in almost every case devoted purely to speculative or hypothetical theoretical systems. [. . .] Nobody claims that such ideas are useful, but why are they considered even interesting? (Danger of Music, p. xv). 191 hear’, 643 who take the ‘time do so some thinking’, would understand his intent. No greater contrast can be made than between Margarita Mazo’s, Marina Sabinina’s, Henry Orlov’s, Rudolf Barshai’s, and Solomon Volkov’s native insights and that of ‘America’s most brilliant musicologist’. As noted on pp. 122–25 above, these Russian scholars and performers have not only heard but have commented on Shostakovich’s hidden messages, to which Taruskin remains stone-deaf and close-minded. Remarkably, Shostakovich in Testimony, p. 234, appears to anticipate, and even respond to, the latter’s skepticism: Meaning in music — that must sound very strange for most people. Particularly in the West. It’s here in Russia that the question is usually posed: What was the composer trying to say, after all, with this musical work? What was he trying to make clear? The questions are naïve, of course, but despite their naïveté and crudity, they definitely merit being asked. And I would add to them, for instance: Can music attack evil? Can it make man stop and think? Can it cry out and thereby draw man’s attention to various vile acts to which he has grown accustomed? to the things he passes without any interest? 644 Ian Macdonald, one of Taruskin’s favorite targets, has commented at length on the latter’s own inconsistent and illogical positions: On the question of whether Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony alludes, at the same time, to the 1905 Russian Revolution and the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, Taruskin writes: ‘Did the composer intend it? The question is naive, unanswerable, and irrelevant’. The question, quite obviously, is none of these. How, for example, can it be ‘naive’ to ask what another person intends or intended? We spend our lives doing just that; indeed our criminal courts to a large extent function on finding answers to questions 643 A favorite Shostakovich expression. Cf. Wilson, pp. 317 and 346, and note 365 above. 644 Taruskin and Brown like to quote a statement by Shostakovich in Sovetskaya Muzyka, 3, 1933, p. 121, mocking a literal meaning attached to a musical work: ‘When a critic, in Worker and Theater or The Evening Red Gazette, writes that in such-and-such a symphony Soviet civil servants are represented by the oboe and the clarinet, and Red Army men by the brass section, you want to scream!’ (cf. Defining Russia Musically, pp. 480–81 and Shostakovich Studies, p. 53). However, was the young composer here rejecting all vivid and concrete images in music or merely a particular example? As it turns out, the older Shostakovich could be quite explicit in describing his own intent of a work. Cf. pp. 134–37 and 266 for his explanation to Yevtushenko and others of his intended meaning in the Seventh Symphony. Similarly, Valentin Berlinsky recalls: Dmitry Dmitriyevich one day, as we were simply sitting — well, and also drinking a little vodka — said that although there was no programme for this quartet [No. 3] his idea was that the first movement depicted peaceful Soviet life. Nothing was occurring and everything was calm. The second movement was the beginning of the Second World War, although not yet in Russia; still outside the country, in Poland, Czechoslovakia [sings the first violin theme from bar 3 of the second movement]. The third movement is the tank armada invasion of Russian territory, the fourth movement a requiem for the dead, and the fifth movement a philosophical reflection on the fate of man’ (Judith Kuhn, ‘The String Quartets’, Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich, p. 42). 192 of this sort. Were such questions ‘unanswerable’, it would, for example, be impossible to distinguish between murder and manslaughter. Nor is the fact that Shostakovich is dead guarantee that we can no longer discover his intentions. In the first place, we have the testimonies of those who knew him (testimonies which Taruskin arrogantly dismisses); in the second place, logic alone determines that we might yet find an explicit answer to this question in a document the composer wrote but which has not yet been discovered. 645 That Taruskin wishes thus to impose ‘closure’ on a question which can have no expiry date confirms both his general lack of acquaintance with logic and his unprincipled drive, at all costs, to dictate the limits of the Shostakovich debate. [. . .] As for Taruskin’s desperate suggestion that Shostakovich’s intentions are ‘irrelevant’ to the understanding of his music, it is incredible that a supposedly intelligent participant in this debate should advance such an inane opinion at this late stage. Taruskin’s own expressed views on the Odessa letter, on the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony, and on the Eighth Quartet in general clearly show that he himself takes the composer’s intentions centrally into account. If what he has written in this devious and dishonest polemic means anything at all it is that views on Shostakovich’s intentions should be counted ‘irrelevant’ if they emanate from persons other than himself. 646 645 Consider Shostakovich’s 19 July 1960 letter to Glikman about the significance of musical quotations in his Eighth Quartet and his 29 August and 17 September 1953 letters to Elmira Nazirova explaining the E– A–E–D–A motive in his Tenth Symphony and its relation to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, all of which came to light only long after the composer’s death. 646 Ian MacDonald, ‘The Turning Point’, DSCH Journal, 9, Summer 1998, p. 63, note 64. On the other hand, Taruskin emphasizes the need to view Wagner’s music in its proper historical and social context and, apparently, not just as ‘a loud noise from an orchestra’ with no inherent meaning: It does no good to argue that the music itself is inherently nonpolitical and nonracist. The music does not now exist, nor has it ever existed, in a social vacuum. Its meanings are not self-contained. They are inscribed not only by its creator, but by its users, Nazi and Jew alike. Leonard Bernstein has written that ‘the “Horst Wessel Lied” may have been a Nazi hymn, but divorced from its words it’s just a pretty song’. Can we divorce it from its words? No more than we can follow the friendly sorcerer’s recipe for turning lead into gold (melt and stir for three hours without thinking of the word rhinoceros). To say we should try is like asking, ‘But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?’ (Danger of Music, p. 22). And why does Taruskin praise Kenneth Slowik’s recording of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht? Because only a performance as sensitive as Mr. Slowik’s to all the minutely shifting narrative connections that Schoenberg’s program note sets forth [. . .] can make the most of the composer’s musical rhetoric and forestall the boredom that a too evenly paced, ‘purely musical’, performance of this thinnish composition all too easily invites (Danger of Music, p. 96). 193 MacDonald’s last point is both important and valid. For example, in discussing Shostakovich’s ‘Odessa letter’ 647 Taruskin has no qualms deciphering the meaning of a discrepancy in two lists of twenty-eight names, in which only the initials of A. P. Kirilenko and A. I. Kirichenko are exchanged the second time. Here he does not claim that ‘a mistake on the page is just a mistake on the page. It doesn’t inherently mean one thing or another’. Instead, he concludes that Shostakovich was making a joke, ‘portraying the pair as the Ukrainian nomenklatura’s Dobchinsky and Bobchinsky, the Tweedledee—Tweedledum bureaucrats in Gogol’s farce, The Inspector General’. 648 Also in explicit self-contradiction, Taruskin devotes forty pages to pondering the hidden message of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, ‘a richly coded utterance’. 649 Even when discussing other composers’ music, Taruskin freely elaborates on the meaning of a work while, at the same time, denouncing others for doing the same thing. For example, he is certain that the title ‘“Samuel” Goldenberg and “Schmuÿle”’ in Pictures at an Exhibition refers not to two Jews, but to one, taking into consideration Musorgsky’s anti-Semitism, the quotation marks around the names in the ‘unsanitized title’ (which he notes Vladimir Stasov changed to ‘Two Jews, Rich and Poor’ only after the composer’s death), and other factors. ‘The only likely explanation — the explanation, at any rate that seems likely to me — is that we are dealing not with two zhidy but only one, and that the portrait is a brazen insult: no matter how dignified or sophisticated or Europeanized a zhid’s exterior, on the inside he is a jabbering, pestering little “Schmuyle”’. 650 It should be emphasized that in Shostakovich Reconsidered and the present text we have not attempted to divine our own meanings for Shostakovich’s works, but only to document the composer’s views as expressed in Testimony and in conversations and letters to his family, friends, and colleagues. We do not believe that such knowledge limits how one hears, performs, or appreciates a work; on the contrary, knowing a composer’s thoughts on his own music adds a new dimension that the listener is always free to accept or reject. Indeed, in most areas of musicology, information about the inspiration for or intent of a musical work is something valued and studied. Scholars willingly consider the title ‘Eroica’, the scratched out dedication to Napoleon, the background of the French Revolution, and the like in arriving at a more complete understanding of Beethoven’s Third. Similarly, they relate the program of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique to the music as well as the composer’s life and do not try to dismiss it or hide it from view. Even when a detailed program is attached after the fact, as with Liszt’s Les Préludes or Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, these extramusical aspects are deemed worthy of consideration. However, not so in Shostakovich studies à la Taruskin. Taruskin himself may pontificate on a work, but no one else, not even the composer. This, it turns out, is consistent with his wholesale rejection of the authority of a composer’s score. ‘What would it take for Taruskin to say of a performance, “this just 647 Story of a Friendship, p. 135. 648 ‘Shostakovich and Us’, Bartlett (ed.), Shostakovich in Context, pp. 1–2, and Defining Russia Musically, p. 469. 649 Taruskin, ‘Public Lies and Unspeakable Truths: Interpreting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony’, in Fanning (ed.), Shostakovich Studies, pp. 17–56. 650 Cf. the expanded discussion of this in On Russian Music, pp. 198–200. 194 doesn’t count as an even minimally faithful rendition of Beethoven”? At what point would he invoke the authority of the score, for example, as limiting the liberties available to the performer?’ Taruskin answers: ‘There is no such point at which I would invoke the authority of the score as limiting the liberties available to the performer. [. . .] Taking liberties is absolutely all right with me, if it leads to a result I like’. 651 In his latest book, The Danger of Music, Taruskin distinguishes between criticism and censorship: The confusion of criticism with censorship or worse is one of the paramount vices that chill the free exchange of ideas. It is nothing more than a crybaby tactic, and those who invoke it when their ox is the one being gored often learn to their cost that it can just as easily cut the other way. 652 651 Danger of Music, p. 450; emphasis added. James Richman, in ‘Taruskin Agonistes: Text and Act Reconsidered’, American Recorder, 39/4, September 1998, pp. 15–16, observes that Taruskin’s attacks on other performers may be a weird sort of revenge on those who rejected his performances in the diverse and active musical scene that characterized New York City in the 1970s. As a performer of Renaissance and Baroque music, Taruskin was widely viewed as hopelessly Romantic, disregarding information that had been wrung from the original sources and producing performances of Ockeghem and Couperin that could have been mistaken for Stokowski outtakes. When he finally understood that his colleagues didn’t care to justify their basic attitudes at every rehearsal, Taruskin responded with, ‘If I’m not authentic, none of you can be either’. [. . .] To save his self-esteem, the only path available was to dismiss the entire process as pointless and nowhere near as important as being true to oneself. Of course, there is no particular contradiction between being true to oneself and respectful of the composer and his context, but for Taruskin there has to be, by definition. And therefore performers in the early music field are to be condemned for subjecting their own personalities to the composers’. Sadly for him, this is a problem only if your taste and self-interest are very much at odds with the composers. As with love, many are delighted to submit where others find only discomfort and disgust.[. . .] Taruskin’s advice to the players in our ensemble, Concert Royal, was inevitably ‘don’t worry about period practice, etc., just play it my way’. In chamber music, one plays the other members’ way as a matter of course, but Taruskin’s ‘ideas’ were so predictable and his defense of them based on such meager scraps that the situation soon became impossible. He left us when the members refused to surrender the right to pursue our impossible dream. Our (and others’) rejection of his preferences didn't seem to bother him at the time, but I think that as he became more and more isolated, and as more and more evidence came in that left him on the wrong side of the facts, he may have become bitter. Taruskin, at the very beginning of Text and Act, p. 3, acknowledges this controversy: Some years after I had moved away from New York City and left my performing activities behind, I learned that a fable lived on there about a self-serving choir director who used to give dreadfully unauthentic performances of Renaissance music and who, when this was pointed out to him, resolved not to reform but instead to wreck the whole idea of authenticity. ‘And that’, the fable concludes, ‘is why we can no longer use the word’. Although he portrays this as a fable rather than fact, one wonders if rejection of Taruskin’s performances influenced his decision to leave New York City for Berkeley, California, and to focus on writing. 652 Danger of Music, pp. 92–93. 195 This observation is rather amusing in light of Taruskin’s own attempt to censor us from criticizing him. In 1998 Allan Ho submitted an abstract for a paper to the national meeting of the American Musicological Society, the title of which questioned why the leading Western scholars in Russian music research had failed to report any of the evidence that corroborated Testimony: was it due to complacency, a cover-up, or incompetence? 653 We expected these scholars to answer the question. They would not. Neither Fay, nor Taruskin, nor Brown would agree to be the official respondent, a role that eventually fell to David Fanning. Only later did we learn via Taruskin’s ‘Cramb Lecture’ in Glasgow (2000) that he had written to Professor John W. Hill, a member of the American Musicological Society’s Program Committee, in an attempt to have the paper rejected. According to Taruskin: I was sent these abstracts by the program committee, together with an invitation to serve as a respondent at the session. Of course I objected to their being considered for presentation at a scholarly meeting, citing to Prof. John Hill, the program director, the AMS’s own recently promulgated ‘Guidelines for Ethical Conduct,’ which read, in part: Free inquiry in the scholarly community assumes a sincere commitment to reasoned discourse, intellectual honesty, professional integrity, diversity of scholarly interests and approaches; openness to constructive, respectful debate and to alternative interpretations; and, withal, adherence to accepted standards of civility. [. . .] I regret to say not only that these abstracts were accepted, but that I also received a curt missive from Prof. Hill admonishing me for trying to suppress the airing of other opinions than my own. [. . .] At least I was able to embarrass Prof. Hill into sanitizing the abstracts for publication. 654 Prior to this admission, we were unaware of these messages ‘From Above’. We received emails on 8 July 1998 from Professor Hill merely requesting a modification in our 653 In The Danger of Music, p. 48, Taruskin asks: ‘But is there no difference between a critic and a censor? No difference between raising a question and imposing a ban?’ Here our ‘crime’ was merely questioning Taruskin et al.’s silence. Taruskin’s desire to define censorship his way is evident in the brouhaha that ensued after the Boston Symphony canceled a performance of John Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer after the 9/11 attack. Taruskin points out that the Taliban’s censorship of music is bad; however, here the Boston Symphony displayed ‘forbearance’, ‘discretion’, and ‘self control’: ‘Censorship is always deplorable, but the exercise of forbearance can be noble. Not to be able to distinguish the noble from the deplorable is morally obtuse’ (Danger of Music, pp. 171 and 173). 654 Cf. Taruskin, ‘Cramb Lecture’, p. 30. The original and ‘sanitized’ abstracts are included on pp. 259 and 260 below. The most significant change was the removal of certain names at the end of the second paragraph, where the original read: ‘Fay, Taruskin, and Brown also have been loathe to correct statements in their own and other writers’ criticisms of Testimony which even they must now know are false and unjust’. This calls to mind how Kabalevsky, also behind the scenes, had his name removed from the list of composers condemned in 1948 (cf. note 368 above). Ironically, in The Danger of Music, p. xv, Taruskin justifies naming names in his own vitriolic criticism of others: ‘In every case names are named (which has led to most of the bitterest controversy), not for the sake of scandal, but because it is always necessary to show that one is not arguing with straw men’. 196 abstracts. We agreed. We find it hilarious that Taruskin, the most rude and uncivil of modern musicologists, should now hide behind ‘guidelines for ethical conduct’ and ‘accepted standards of civility’ — the same Taruskin who accused Ian MacDonald of ‘vile trivialisation’ and the use of ‘McCarthyite’ and ‘Stalinist’ methods, 655 and who did not object when Fay, at the 3 November 1995 national meeting of the American Musicological Society, called MacDonald’s The New Shostakovich a ‘moronic tract’. Others, such as Marc Geelhoed, have previously commented on Taruskin’s own lack of civility and bully-like style: Taruskin’s lusty bravado and the rude, put-down-laden qualities of some of his writing has always rubbed me the wrong way, since it’s more appropriate for a tabloid-writer or some paper you could pick up for free in a sidewalk kiosk. (It’s entertaining, but so is a cockfight.) The gloating, the I’ve-forgotten-more-than-you’ll-ever-know arrogance, the snide assertions, none of it is the finest way to discuss either the music, its practitioners or the words written about it. I’ve argued in the past that classical music shouldn’t be treated with kid gloves, or as if it’s not part of contemporary culture, but Taruskin’s intellectual thuggishness ultimately detracts from his arguments. [. . .] He’s like the schoolyard tough with a penchant for the obvious who finds the skinny kid on the playground, then says, ‘You know what your problem is? You’re too skinny!’ before beating him senseless. 656 Similarly, Paul Mitchinson characterizes Taruskin as a ‘pit bull’ and goes on to describe his crude and unprofessional behavior at a Shostakovich conference in Glasgow in 2000. Besides calling others ‘idiotic’, In a ninety-minute harangue that the Glasgow Herald found ‘hugely entertaining’, Taruskin mercilessly ridiculed opponents who had associated his views with everything from pro-Sovietism to anti-Semitism. Taruskin, who is Jewish, threatened to refute the latter charge by ‘drop[ping] my pants in silent protest’. (Discretion prevailed.) Anticommunism, he said with a street fighter’s bravado, ‘is one pissing contest I believe I could win’. 657 655 Fanning (ed.), Shostakovich Studies, pp. 52–53. Taruskin asks ‘And what kind of investigator builds sweeping forensic cases on such selectively marshalled evidence? To that question the answer is obvious, and sinister. [. . . ] The critic’s method is precisely what is known in the West as McCarthyism. [. . . ] / Ian MacDonald, it thus transpires, is the very model of a Stalinist critic’. On the other hand, Taruskin has not criticized either Fay or Brown for their own ‘selective marshalling of evidence’ (documented in detail in Shostakovich Reconsidered and the present text), even when he clearly disagrees, for example, with Fay’s position on From Jewish Folk Poetry (cf. note 587 above). 656 Marc Geelhoed, on the Internet at Download Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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