Richard Taruskin, the pioneering musical scholar, teacher, performer and public intellectual whose eloquent and fiercely argued work exerted a lasting influence on the field, both within the academy and throughout the wider world, died Friday, July 1, at an Oakland hospital. He was 77.

The cause was esophageal cancer, according to his wife, Cathy Roebuck Taruskin, who confirmed his death.

Taruskin spent much of his career on the faculty of UC Berkeley, where he trained several generations of students to view music as he did — as a complex and profoundly human endeavor with implications that reached far beyond esthetics to encompass politics, sociology, history and more.

For him, there was no such thing as “the music itself,” existing only as some bloodless, abstract region of idealized sound. Instead, Taruskin insisted on understanding music as a social practice, subject to the same pressures and incentives that govern other activities.

That in turn meant that political considerations were as important to understanding music as a technical analysis of harmony or rhythm. It meant that written musical scores, though essential to scholars and performers, were at best only an approximation of a full musical experience.

“His example completely changed the way I do research,” said Professor Mary Ann Smart, his Berkeley colleague. “He taught scholars to track what music means to people in a given moment, rather than what a piece means across time. And the whole field went along with him on that.”

Taruskin outlined these positions in voluminous writings that were as stylish and compulsively readable as they were lengthy. “It takes me 100 pages just to sign my name,” heonce quipped.

Through countless thousands of printed pages and many millions of words, Taruskin touched on just about every topic related to Western music. He boasted a particular expertise in Russian music and the music of the medieval and Renaissance periods, but his work encompassed opera and modernism, philosophy and cultural theory.

“He was the greatest music historian of all time,” said Professor Simon Morrison, a specialist in Slavic music at Princeton University. “It’s not just his sheer productivity, which is Tolstoyan, but the fact that he created real diversity in the field.

“The fact that we study Russian music at all in the U.S., for example, is his achievement. He brought rigor and critique and a tremendous amount of homework to a repertoire that had been neglected or walled off because of the Cold War.”

Taruskin’s influence within the world of academia was profound, and his writing in the popular press brought his ideas to an even wider audience. Beginning in the mid-1980s, he regularly published articles in the New York Times and the New Republic that challenged readers’ notions about works they thought they knew well.

One of the first and most explosive of these episodes concerned the world of early music and its growing insistence on “historically informed performance.” Taruskin pushed back on the notion that groups like the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, performing on period instruments in a style thought to reflect the practice of 18th century musicians, were producing something “authentic.”

His counterargument was that the movement’s quick tempos and clipped rhythms were reflective of 20th century sensibilities — and that was actually a worthier goal for living performers.

Both in public and within the academy, Taruskin repeatedly courted controversy. In a 2001 New York Times article, he praised the Boston Symphony for its “forbearance and discretion” in canceling a performance of excerpts from John Adams’ opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. He unapologetically attacked such composers as Prokofiev and Carl Orff for their accommodations to tyrannical regimes.

In the 1980s, Taruskin helped lead the charge against the uncritical acceptance of “Testimony,” a 1979 publication by the journalist Solomon Volkov that purported — based on shaky documentary evidence — to be a secret memoir of Shostakovich’s resistance to the Stalinist regime.

Yet for all the pugnacious fervor of his writing, Taruskin’s goal was never merely to provoke for its own sake. He saw vibrant debate as a pleasurable means to a measurable end, which was a deeper understanding of the history of music and culture.

Debate and assiduous scholarship as well, for Taruskin’s work always rested on a solid foundation of historical evidence. Perhaps his single greatest coup in this regard was “Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions” (1996), a huge two-volume study documenting the extent to which the composer, after having been driven from his homeland, had systematically obscured and falsified his deep links to his Russian heritage.

2005年,Taruskin公布了他的代表作,“The Oxford History of Western Music,”a massive six-volume project that traced the course of European and American from the Middle Ages to the turn of the millennium. It was a characteristically ambitious and brilliant undertaking, and one unlikely to be repeated.

Taruskin was born in New York City on April 2, 1945, and grew up in a cultured, lively and politically engaged family. His father was a lawyer and amateur violinist, and his mother a former piano teacher.

Adlai Stevenson’s failed runs for the presidency in 1952 and 1956 were landmark events in the family. Later, Taruskin — whose politics were frequently mischaracterized as either Marxist or neoconservative — described himself as an “old-fashioned liberal,” saying that his political watchword was “What would Adlai do?”

He studied Russian and music at Columbia University and, after a year’s sojourn in Moscow on a Fulbright Scholarship, returned to earn a doctorate at Columbia and then to join its faculty. He taught there until 1987, when he joined the Berkeley faculty. He retired in 2014.

Early in his career, Taruskin was an active performer of new music. He was a virtuoso on the viola da gamba, and conducted Renaissance choral groups in New York.

Despite his gift for public vituperation — and his habit of shooting off postcards to scholars or journalists he felt had made embarrassing errors — Taruskin was known to be a warm colleague and mentor.

“He was 100% supportive and generous, and very easy to get along with,” Smart said. “You could not have asked for a better senior colleague.”

Among Taruskin’s many publications are “Music in the Western World,” a 1984 compilation of primary historical documents on which he collaborated with his Columbia colleague Piero Weiss; “Text and Act” (1995), a collection of essays on the historical performance movement; “The Danger of Music” (2008), a collection of essays on music and politics; and at least four volumes of studies of Russian music. In 2017, he became the first music scholar to win the prestigiousKyoto Prize, after such figures as Olivier Messiaen, John Cage and Cecil Taylor.

In addition to his wife, Taruskin is survived by his son, Paul; his daughter, Tessa; his sister, Miriam Lawrence; his brother, Raymond; and two grandchildren. Plans for a memorial service are pending.