Music Media Monthly

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words, by Riccardo Muti; afterward by Marco Grondona

Conductors, given their highly visible roles in symphony and opera come in two basic and opposing flavors: the humanists/persuaders (Koussevitsky, Bernstein, Mitropoulos) and the autocrats/high priests/maestros (Szell, Toscanini, Reiner). Riccardo Muti belongs in the first category. Reading Muti’s autobiography, it seems likely that two factors contributed to forming his temperate approach to music making. First, there is his southern Italian birth in the affable town of Molfetta, near Naples and below the Gargano Peninsula on the Adriatic. Second, as primarily an opera conductor, Muti has had to acquire (or, if the proclivity is natural, to tap into) those people skills that are necessary for effective collaboration with volatile opera singers. The result is a conductor of wide interests – a leader with a philosophical, positive outlook capable of inspiring his musicians to attain transformational levels of performance.

Muti has held important guest posts in Europe and in America. The Maggio Musicale in Florence, Italy’s oldest music festival, focusing on opera; the London’s Philharmonia Orchestra; the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; the New York Philharmonic, and the Salzburg Festival. Currently, Muti is the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony.

At age 70, Muti has had little in the way of high drama or conflict in his life, and his career path over 40 years shows a steady, upward trajectory to the highest conductorial perches. So is the book, then, simply a placid memoir, reflecting on the glories of an untroubled life and career? No. There’s much here to attract and hold the reader’s attention: reflections that impart the spirit of the man, with his ethical values, love for people and, surprisingly, his typically Italian brand of humor. While reading Muti’s book, I thought of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, which reflect a stoic, self-effacing way of life. Here’s a prime example: according to Muti, “a maestro shouldn’t seek out the limelight, especially in the later part of his life. Once he’s had his career, he should withdraw from the media and try, as much as possible, to bring music to others so that he, ephemeral himself, doesn’t fall victim to the ephemeral nature of conducting.” Demonstrating his point, Muti has led concerts for prison inmates and at juvenile detention centers, conducted at Ground Zero for the families of 9/11 victims, and in Sarajevo at the conclusion of the Bosnian war.

A notable aspect of the book is its large selection of photos. Highlights include informal double portraits with England’s Queen Elizabeth II and with Pope John Paul II; Muti as child prodigy violinist; and Muti’s in triumphant performances at La Scala and in Vienna, Japan, Philadelphia and Chicago.

The afterword by Marco Grondona, a 43-page analysis of Muti’s conducting style, compares it to those of Schubert, Bellini and Verdi, among others, and makes for a rather extended postscript. Muti acolytes will love it, no doubt, as it pays tribute to the maestro, saying great things about Muti that the conductor, out of self-effacing humility, has not written. But because of this abrupt change in tone it makes for a strange and awkward stylistic volte-face.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words is recommended primarily for opera lovers, and will make a worthy addition to libraries with collections on conductors and opera.

Riccardo Muti: An Autobiography – First the Music, Then the Words, by Riccardo Muti; afterward by Marco Grondona. Rizzoli, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8478-3724-3. 244 pages. Hardcover.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra

Jazz music and black-and-white art photography are quintessentially 20^th century art forms; both matured at the same time. By the early 1940s, the development of camera technology made hand-held field cameras like the press favorite Speed Graphic 4×5, along with relatively fast film, available for the first time to innovative photographers who loved jazz and were inspired to document the modern jazz scenes–mostly in midtown Manhattan’s jazz bistros, which featured legendary black musicians. The lasting legacy of these visual artists is a treasury of iconic musical imagery. The works of master photographers such as Herman Leonard, Gjon Mili, Allan Grant, William P. Gottlieb, William Claxton, Art Kane and others evokes glorious music from the 1930s through the 1960s that in many ways defines American culture in our mind’s eye and ear.

Benjamin Cawthra’s outstanding book Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz provides a window into the history of jazz and a perfect merging of jazz music and black-and-white art photography. It also illustrates both the gradual merging and eventual divergence of black and white cultures during the middle of the 20th century. As the author writes, “Over the thirty years from 1936-1965, the photography of jazz created a visual rhetoric that argued for racial inclusiveness in the 1930s, racial equality in the 1940s and 1950s, and black cultural nationalism in the 1960s… In making jazz visible, photographers visually equated blackness with jazz at important moments in the music’s stylistic development.”

Jazz lovers will appreciate and learn the backstory of the music as well, for Cawthra’s Blue Notes in Black and White is as much about the musicians themselves–Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and many other seminal artists–as it is about the iconic photographs of them.

My only complaint is that the book should have contained a high quality portfolio section in the form of plates to represent the legendary photographs in their full glory. Instead, we get relatively few of the photographs and most only in half-page sizes and low resolution. Blue Notes in Black and White should really have been a coffee table book, to do justice to the photographic art. It’s for this reason that I cannot recommend it to photographers and students of black-and-white photography, which is a shame. I do highly recommend the book to libraries with extensive jazz collections and to lovers of jazz.

Blue Notes in Black and White – Photography in Jazz, by Benjamin Cawthra. University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-03875-3. 343 pages. Hardcover.

– Steve Dankner