ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that many of Taruskin’s arguments are too sweeping, that they fail to consider adequately the grains of truth embedded in many opposing perspectives. Few scholars in any field today can match Taruskin’s range, in any case, his ability to draw substantively from a great many sources in and out of music. Winner of the 1997 Kinkeldey Award, the two hefty volumes that constitute Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions have been the subject of extensive and for the most part raving reviews in the popular press. Stravinsky regarded himself as instinctual and largely self-taught, in fact, an opinion which seems to have been shared by others. The role of Stravinsky’s Russian past figures no less prominently in accounts of the composer’s subsequent works, including The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky may well have cut an unsympathetic figure between the wars.
