Meet the Rush Limbaugh of Music Criticism

Bless the Internet. If not for it, I wouldn't have met "the Rush Limbaugh of music criticism"...me.

In 1993, writing for the Phoenix Gazette newspaper, I penned some commentary on musicologist Richard Taruskin's commentary about Peter Sellars' stagings of Mozart's operas. (An aside: Try to imagine a daily newpaper - the New York Times doesn't count - paying someone to write such a thing in the year 2008. Unless linked somehow to Britney or Paris, such musings would be spiked.) In it, I objected to what I called Taruskin's "tired, neo-Marxist attempt to make music the slave of history."

I thought that was the end of it. Nope.

Perusing the Internet last week, I discovered that Taruskin had struck back. On p. 271 of his book, Essays on Music and Performance, published in 1996, he quoted my article and dismissed its author with the aforementioned label. To be fair, he quoted me at some length, and accurately, but why he insisted on zinging me with that anti-accolade I cannot guess. The logic is elusive. Because someone wearies of outdated academic viewpoints, it follows that he favors illegal wars, the "Patriot" act, and corporate welfare?

There's hardly room for detailing the reasons for my objection to Taruskin's intellectual frame. Suffice it to say that, when the arts are made mere tools of historical inevitability, their real value is grossly deflated. I hope that doesn't make me the "Dr. Laura" of music criticism.

- Kenneth LaFave