Two cheers for tabloid musicology!

The experience to which Mr. Carter's music gives authoritative access is that of belonging to a self-congratulating coterie, lately beside itself with rage at its loss of power to tyrannize the classical music community.
RICHARD TARUSKIN, letter to the Editor, New York Times, 27 July 1997.*
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There is no denying that the musicologist Richard Taruskin's cantankerous, pugnacious writing style can be refreshingly entertaining in today's climate of PC Jihadism, where sharply negative criticism is readily equated with bullying.  And when such criticism is directed at the works of those who happened not to be white heterosexual gentile males, the critic may end up with the career-destroying label of enemy of diversity, inclusion, equity, sustainability, social justice, and other Stalinist linguistic contortions whose meanings are known only to delusional academics, useless bureaucrats, and self-righteous Silicon Valley nerds.

So, two cheers for Taruskin's tabloid musicology!

I withhold the customary third cheer, however, because my fun with Taruskin's polemics is often spoiled by the paranoid provincialism of his attacks on modernist music, especially the music of Elliott Carter.  On such occasions Taruskin displays a truly Orwellian talent for reconciling frequent and loud declarations of respect for 'empirical methods' in musicological research with his obsessive commitment to psychologically (ideologically, politically) gratifying fantasies.  One such fantasy (which I touched on elsewhere) is that the prestige gained by Carter's music was due entirely to covert machinations of the CIA and other government-funded sources of Cold War propaganda.  Another fantasy, echoed in the above quote, is the now debunked conspiracy theory about the post-World War II "tyranny" of modernist music.

As for Taruskin's snarky "self-congratulating coterie", he seems oblivious to the fact that the expression applies not only to art music in general (whose lovers, after all, constitute a very small and exclusive group compared to lovers of pop music), but to any creative field where enjoyment requires prior investment of time and intellectual effort.  Come to think of it, those who enjoy musicology belong just as much to a self-congratulating coterie as those who enjoy algebraic geometry, quantum chemistry, symbolist poetry, or Elliott Carter's music.
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*  Taruskin's letter is more than twenty years old, but his hostility toward Carter's music remains undiminished.  This much I learned from a friend who had a brief chat with Taruskin at this summer's Bard Music Festival.