“The Bay Area musicologist Richard Taruskin, a prolific and wide-ranging scholar whose work has challenged conventional notions of music history and performance, has won the prestigious Kyoto Prize—the first music scholar to win the award,” writes Joshua Kosman in Saturday’s (6/17) San Francisco Chronicle. “The Kyoto Prize, given annually since 1985 by the Inamori Foundation, recognizes three winners in a rotating array of subcategories under the headings of Advanced Technology, Basic Sciences, and Arts and Philosophy. The prize comes with a cash award of 50 million yen (about $450,000). Previous winners in the field of music have all been composers or performers, including Olivier Messiaen, John Cage, and most recently, the jazz pianist and composer Cecil Taylor. Taruskin, 72, retired in 2014 from the music department of UC Berkeley…. He is best known as an expert on Russian music, having written a groundbreaking two-volume study of Stravinsky and fought public battles against a variety of myths that have sprung up about the lives and careers of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. But he is also the author of the ‘Oxford History of Western Music’—a magisterial six-volume magnum opus … and countless essays, articles and public talks.”
Posted June 19, 2017
