What Do You Have in Common with Riccardo Muti?

Riccardo Muti, the newly designated music director of the acclaimed Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was drawing one analogy in an interview yesterday morning, and it was a good one. I would like to borrow his analogy and apply it differently, to make a parallel point.

 

In an interview published in the Chicago Tribune, the Italian maestro was addressing a cultural barrier between much of working-class Chicago and the city’s symphony, which has garnered praise and honors around the globe. Then he observed that a symphony must function as a model of civic cooperation.

“Each section of the orchestra plays a different and independent part,” said Muti, referring to the strings and the horns and so forth. “But they put their parts together without killing what their colleagues are doing, so as to achieve a finished performance. They perform together to reach a superior goal—a unity of sound and expression—through cooperation.” He said this broad cooperation was instructive for any community and indeed any society.

A business of any appreciable size has a similar challenge. For sake of example, let’s think of a manufacturer, though the analogy would be equally valid for a service provider or a retail store or a distributor—any organization with divisions and departments. In our example, the sales department, the manufacturing division, and the accounting office are like the strings and the horns of an orchestra. They must work together for everyone’s benefit. If instead they choose to elevate their own interest over the whole organization’s interest, they will wind up with noise, not music. Their “audience”—the customer, after all—will not be happy.

Unfortunately for the business, each division and department does not have its own musical score, its own formal part of the composition to play, note for note. In this respect, the business enterprise is perhaps more like a jazz combo, performing from a theme but with individual instruments playing harmonic riffs of their own, all within the overall framework of the piece. Still, the analogy holds.

Muti’s comment reminded me of a remark that his predecessor, Daniel Barenboim, once made in an interview with Chicago’s classical music radio station, WFMT. Barenboim observed that, as a conductor, it was essential for him to step back and let each performer contribute to the best of her ability. If he ignored that vital principle, if he instead played with a heavy baton that controlled and stifled the individual musicians, the orchestra's music would be heard as oppressed and lifeless.

In both cases, we have tensions that, if managed well, ultimately work to the advantage of the whole, and ultimately to the benefit of the customer. And in both cases, the role of the leader is more to coalesce than to control, more to draw forth than to draw tight, more to inspire than to influence. 

 

Comments

[Julian]

On the whole Muti influences more than inspires. So do not expect miracles but a decent sound which at times can be brilliant depending on the composer he appreciates.
Muti is almost a genious but he messes it up when it comes to his obsessions on what he feels is right or not. He does not negotiate once he has made up his mind, which makes him a rather difficult person to deal with. Poor musicians are going to sigh a lot of times until they finish with him after his 5-year-tenure.