Larry Ruttman ’58 has always been a people person. “That’s what I’m really interested in. People,” he says. It’s a trait that most recently inspired his latest book, Intimate Conversations: Face to Face with Matchless Musicians.
As one of the oldest living alumni of Boston College Law School’s class of 1958, Ruttman has had ample time to acquire many personal and career titles, among them husband (of Lois for sixty years), legal general practitioner (retired), historian, TV host, and podcaster of “A Life Lived Backwards: One Man’s Life.” Author is one of his favorites.
“I’ve always been able to write some,” Ruttman says, an ability that has yielded Voices of Brookline; American Jews and America’s Game, named the #1 Baseball Book of 2013 by Sports Collectors Digest; the forthcoming memoir A Life Lived Backwards; and Intimate Conversations, which was published by Torchflame Books in October and contains twenty-one musician interviews.
Although many who write such books are musical experts of one kind or another, Ruttman says his primary credential is that of—well—a person who wants to engage with the people who make, and read about, music. Qualifying took a lifetime and his own brand of musical research.
His interest in music—primarily classical—began when he was in his thirties and bought an album containing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major. It inspired the personally idiosyncratic journey that led to Intimate Conversations. Among his most educative guides were the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s programs containing information on each concert’s musical history, composer, and composition. Ruttman, a BSO regular, says he became “sort of a musicologist,” just by reading them.
The outcome, according to Kirkus Reviews, is a list of interviewees in the classical music world that Ruttman assembled, “separating them into such sections as composers (John Harbison, Unsuk Chin, Osvaldo Golijov), conductors (Gil Rose, Martin Pearlman), instrumentalists and vocalists (Anne-Sophie Mutter, Susan Graham, Aiko Onishi), music management (Mark Volpe), and the ‘beyond genre’ (Ran Blake, Eden MacAdam-Somer, Monica Rizzio).”Diving into the minds of notable musicians—from composers to instrumentalists to opera singers—in order to write a book, proved an ideal strategy. At last, Ruttman had acquired what he needed to engage three sets of people—musicians, readers, and himself—in “intimate conversations.”
“Diving into the minds of notable musicians—from composers to instrumentalists to opera singers—in order to write a book, proved an ideal strategy for author Larry Ruttman.”