Richard Taruskin, professor of University of California, Berkeley, is a musicologist, music historian, and critic who has written about the theory of performance, Russian music, fifteenth-century music, twentieth-century music, nationalism, the theory of modernism, and analysis. As a choral conductor he directed the Columbia University Collegium Musicum. He played the viola da gamba with the Aulos Ensemble from the late seventies to the late eighties. He received various awards for his scholarship. His Opus Magnus - “Oxford History of Western music” – in six volumes gains him a world fame. Not so long ago the influential musical observer of “The New York times” dubbed him “the most prominent and most provocative musicologist of our time” - for his numerous and innovative monographs as well as for his critics (often paradoxical and polemical) published in New York Times, New Republic, Opus, Atlantic Monthly a.o. newspapers and magazines.
Professor Taruskin is rather frequent visitor to Russia. In 2006 he delivered a lecture at EUSP.
Right now the Moscow Publishing House “Klassika XXI” is going to publish in Russian his book “Defining Russia Musically”
