Gunther Schuller

For more information on Gunther Alexander Schuller, visit Britannica.com.

(b New York, 22 Nov 1925). American composer, conductor and teacher. He studied at the St Thomas Choir School (1938-42) and had a career as a horn player, notably at the Met (1945-59), He has taught at Tanglewood (from 1963) and was an innovatory, energetic president of the New England Conservatory, 1967-77. He has conducted internationally (notably new music), studied jazz and produced a large output, mostly of orchestral and chamber music, but also opera (including The Visitation, 1966). His works draw on Schoenberg, Babbitt, Stravinsky and jazz.

---

The versatility of the American musician Gunther Schuller (born 1925) was recognized when he received the Alice M. Ditson Award from Columbia University in 1970: "You have already achieved distinction in six careers, as conductor, as composer, as horn virtuoso and orchestral musician, and as author and educator."

Gunther Schuller was born in New York City on November 22, 1925, the son of a New York Philharmonic Orchestra violinist. He sang as a boy soprano in the St. Thomas Church choir, studied flute and French horn privately, and studied music theory at the Manhattan School of Music. Before he was 20, he was a professional hornist, playing in the Ballet Theater Orchestra and later with the Cincinnati Symphony. From 1945 to 1959 he played with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Schuller's first published compositions date from 1950, but it was his Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959) that brought him wide attention through performances by many orchestras and through recordings. In this piece Schuller revealed himself as a masterful orchestrator in complete control of a serialism inspired by Anton Webern. The piece had wit and charm, unusual components of serial compositions. In some of the Studies Schuller matched the color of the pictures with orchestral color, and in others, such as "The Twittering Machine," and the "Arab Village," he reflected the mood and atmosphere of the pictures in the music.

There was a strong jazz influence in all of Schuller's compositions. The composer called the combination of jazz elements with serial practices "third stream" music, a term which has been generally adopted to describe this typically American musical development. During the 1960s Schuller received a number of grants that allowed him to devote himself entirely to composition.

In 1965, as composer-in-residence in Berlin, Schuller completed his opera The Visitation, first produced in Hamburg in 1966. For his libretto the composer adapted Franz Kafka's story The Trial, changing the setting to the American South and the characters to African-Americans. Thus altered, it became a powerful and timely statement of the plight of black Americans. The music was in Schuller's "third stream" manner with much jazz. The Visitation, a sensational success in its first European productions, was less successful when produced in the United States. He subsequently wrote two more operas, The Fisherman and His Wife (1970) and A Question of Taste (1989).

In 1968 Schuller published the first volume of his monumental history of jazz, proving himself to be the outstanding authority in this field. After teaching at Yale, he became president of the New England Conservatory in 1966, and a few years later, director of the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood as well (1970-1985). He was unrivaled among American musicians of his generation for the versatility and quality of his accomplishments. In 1993, Schuller received Down Beat magazine's prestigious Hall of Fame and Lifetime Achievement awards.

During the 1990s, Schuller broadened his conducting repertoire and also published The Compleat Conductor (1997), a detailed analysis of eight symphonic works in which he compared the composer's written intentions with the actual recorded performances of those pieces over the last 50 years.

Further Reading

David Ewen, The World of Twentieth-century Music (1968), provides biographical information and a discussion of Schuller's works. A short biography of him was in Gilbert Chase, ed., The American Composer Speaks (1966). He was profiled in Down Beat (September 1993).

• Born: November 11, 1925, New York, NY [Jackson Heights]
• Active: '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, 2000s
• Genres: Jazz
• Instrument: French Horn, Conductor, Composer
• Representative Albums: "Art of Scott Joplin," "Jumpin' in the Future," "The Art of the Rag"

Biography

Gunther Schuller is probably the greatest friend jazz has ever had from the classical world. A jazz devotee from the beginning, he has been the most outspoken advocate of a fusion between elements of European classical music and jazz, inventing the term "Third Stream" at a 1957 Brandeis University lecture to describe it. Although Third Stream music had been around in some form since the beginning of the century, it was Schuller who crystallized the idea, and thanks to alliances with such jazz figures as John Lewis, George Russell, Charles Mingus and Jimmy Giuffre, he actively encouraged new works in that form. Schuller's own compositions often include jazz elements, though usually far more abstractly integrated into his own twelve-tone music than the works of the jazz musicians he has encouraged. As a conductor, Schuller inadvertently helped touch off a popular ragtime fad in the 1970s with his spirited performances of Scott Joplin, and he has participated in some key jazz recordings as a French horn player. He has also been a tireless mover and shaker for jazz studies programs in universities, which have had a profound and controversial effect on the direction of the music in the last third of the 20th century.

Ironically, in view of his efforts to bring jazz into academia and the concert hall, Schuller is entirely self-taught as a composer. As befitting the son of a violinist with the New York Philharmonic, he did study theory, flute, and French horn privately, but his progress on the latter was so swift that he began playing professionally with the American Ballet Theatre in 1943, and held down first-desk positions with the Cincinnati Symphony (1943-45) and the Metropolitan Opera (1945-59). He first attracted notice on the jazz side of the fence by playing French horn on four tracks of Miles Davis' seminal Birth of the Cool sessions in 1950, also appearing in Gil Evans' orchestra on Miles' Porgy and Bess. As his enthusiasm for mergers of both of his worlds grew during the 1950s, Schuller founded the Jazz and Classical Music Society with John Lewis in 1955, which presented concerts of music written by both classical and jazz composers. One of the outcroppings from this society was a Columbia recording, Music for Brass, which contained various compositions by Schuller, Lewis, Giuffre and J.J. Johnson as performed by musicians from across the spectrum like Miles Davis, Schuller himself, and New York Philharmonic conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos.

In conjunction with his famous Brandeis lecture, Schuller started a jazz festival there in 1957, commissioning works from Russell, Mingus, and Giuffre. He continued to turn out Third Stream compositions like "Transformation" (1957), "Concertino for jazz quartet and orchestra" (1959), "Conversations for the double quartet of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Beaux Arts String Quartet" (heard on the MJQ's Third Stream album), and "Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk" (1960). He and Lewis founded the Lenox School of Jazz Summer School and presented the first jazz concert ever held at Lenox's hitherto solidly classical bastion, Tanglewood, in 1963.

Having given up the French horn in 1962, Schuller merely narrowed his multi-pronged activities down to conducting, composing, teaching and writing. 1967 found Schuller becoming the president of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he promptly established a jazz department that became the first to offer a four-year B.A. degree in jazz. Schuller also started the New England Conservatory Jazz Repertory Orchestra and Ragtime Ensemble, and he soon became immersed in transcribing the works of Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton and performing period arrangements of Scott Joplin rags. The latter activity resulted in The Red Back Book (Angel), which became a runaway hit album in 1973, reawakening interest in the rags of Joplin and touching off their use in the popular movie The Sting. Schuller's involvement in the ragtime revival reached its apogee in 1975, when he conducted the first (and thus far, only) recording of Joplin's opera Treemonisha (Deutsche Grammophon) with the Houston Grand Opera, and Schuller and the NEC Ragtime Ensemble would tour well into the next decade.

In recent years, Schuller reconstructed, edited and conducted the posthumous premiere of Mingus' Epitaph at Lincoln Center in 1989, while modestly not claiming to have said the last word on this huge, chaotic work. In the classical sphere, his symphonic piece Of Reminiscences and Reflections won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1994. He also found the time to write two massive, erudite tomes on jazz, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (1968) and The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930-1945 (1989), which chronicle and analyze the music in unprecedentedly thorough detail. He then began work on Volume III, which will take readers from bebop to the present. In June 2001, Cambridge, MA institution the Longy School of Music awarded Gunther Schuller the Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society. Just weeks later a new work by Schuller was premiered at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival. ~ Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide

Journey into Jazz Buy this CD

Art of the Rag Buy this CD

Jumpin' in the Future Buy this CD

Art of Scott Joplin Buy this CD

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)