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Richard Taruskin (born 1945) is an American-Russian 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, including the Noah Greenberg Prize (1978) from the American Musicological Society, the Alfred Einstein Award (1980), the Dent Medal (1987), the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award (1988) and the 1997 and 2006 Kinkeldey Prize from the American Musicological Society. On the faculty of Columbia University until 1986, he is now professor of musicology at the University of California, Berkeley, holding the Class of 1955 Chair.

Taruskin's book on Igor Stravinsky shows that the composer drew on much more Russian folk material than has previously been recognized, and analyzes the historical trends that caused Stravinsky not to be forthcoming about some of these borrowings. He has also written extensively for lay readers, including numerous articles in The New York Times, many of which have been collected in Text and Act (in which he is an influential critic of the premises of the "early music" movement in classical music performance), The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays, and On Russian Music.

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