Gunther Alexander Schuller (November 22, 1925 – June 21, 2015)[1] was an American composer, conductor,
horn player, author, historian, educator, publisher, and
jazz musician.
Biography and works
Early years
Schuller was born in
Queens, New York City,[1] the son of German parents Elsie (Bernartz) and Arthur E. Schuller, a violinist with the
New York Philharmonic.[2]
He studied at the
Saint Thomas Choir School and became an accomplished
French horn player and flute player.
At age 15, he was already playing horn professionally with the
American Ballet Theatre (1943) followed by an appointment as principal hornist with the
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (1943–45), and then the
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York, where he stayed until 1959.[3]
During his youth, he attended the Precollege Division at the
Manhattan School of Music, later going on to teach at the school.[4] But, already a high school dropout because he wanted to play professionally, Schuller never obtained a degree from any institution.[5] He began his career in jazz by recording as a horn player with
Miles Davis (1949–50).[6]
Performance and growth
In 1955, Schuller and jazz pianist
John Lewis founded the Modern Jazz Society,[6] which gave its first concert at
Town Hall, New York, the same year and later became known as the Jazz and Classical Music Society. While lecturing at
Brandeis University in 1957, he coined the term "
Third Stream" to describe music that combines
classical and jazz techniques.[7] He became an enthusiastic advocate of this style and wrote many works according to its principles, among them Transformation (1957, for jazz ensemble),[8]Concertino (1959, for jazz quartet and orchestra),[9]Abstraction (1959, for nine instruments),[10] and Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk (1960, for 13 instruments) utilizing
Eric Dolphy and
Ornette Coleman.[10] In 1966, he composed the opera The Visitation.[11]
He also orchestrated
Scott Joplin's only known surviving opera Treemonisha for the
Houston Grand Opera's premiere production of this work in 1975.[12]
Career maturity
In 1959, Schuller largely gave up performance to devote himself to composition, teaching and writing. He conducted internationally and studied and recorded jazz with such greats as
Dizzy Gillespie and John Lewis among many others.[6] Schuller wrote over 190 original compositions in many musical genres.[13]
In the 1970s and 1980s Schuller founded the publishers Margun Music and Gun-Mar and the record label GM Recordings.[15][16] Margun Music and Gun-Mar were sold to
Music Sales Group in 1999.[17]
Schuller recorded the LP Country Fiddle Band with the Conservatory's country fiddle band, released by
Columbia Records in 1976. Reviewing in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981),
Robert Christgau wrote: "The melodies are fetchingly tried-and-true, the (unintentional?) stateliness of the rhythms appropriately
nineteenth-century, and the instrumental overkill (twenty-four instruments massed on 'Flop-Eared Mule') both gorgeous and hilarious. A grand novelty."[18]
Schuller was editor-in-chief of Jazz Masterworks Editions, and co-director of the
Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra[19] in Washington, D.C. Another effort of preservation was his editing and posthumous premiering at
Lincoln Center in 1989 of
Charles Mingus's immense final work, Epitaph, subsequently released on Columbia/Sony Records.[20] He was the author of two major books on the history of jazz, Early Jazz (1968)[21] and The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945.[22]
From 1993 until his death, Schuller served as Artistic Director for the Northwest Bach Festival in
Spokane, Washington state. Each year the festival showcased works by
J.S. Bach and other composers in venues around Spokane. At the 2010 festival, Schuller conducted the
Mass in B minor at
St. John's Cathedral, sung by the Bach Festival Chorus, composed of professional singers in Eastern Washington, and the BachFestival, composed of members of the Spokane Symphony and others. Other notable performances Schuller conducted at the festival include the
St Matthew Passion in 2008 and Handel's Messiah in 2005.
Schuller's association with Spokane began with guest conducting the Spokane Symphony for one week in 1982.[26] He then served as Music Director from 1984 to 1985[27] and later regularly appeared as a guest conductor. Schuller also served as Artistic Director to the nearby Festival at Sandpoint.[28]
In 2005, the Boston Symphony, New England Conservatory, and Harvard University presented a festival of Schuller's music, curated by
Bruce Brubaker, titled "I Hear America." At the time, Brubaker remarked, "Gunther Schuller is a key witness to American musical culture."[29] His modernist orchestral work Where the Word Ends, organized in four movements corresponding to those of a symphony, was premiered by the
Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2009.[7]
In 2011 Schuller published the first volume of a two-volume autobiography, Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty.[30]
In 2012, Schuller premiered a new arrangement, the Treemonishasuite from Joplin's opera. It was performed as part of The Rest is Noise season at London's South Bank in 2013.[31]
Schuller died on June 21, 2015, in
Boston, from complications from
leukemia. He married Marjorie Black, a singer and pianist, in 1948, and the marriage lasted until her death in 1992.[32][1] His sons George and Ed survive him, as does his brother Edgar.
^Dwight Winenger (September 11, 1999).
"Irwin Swack Music". Dwightwinenger.net. Archived from
the original on May 12, 2013. Retrieved October 26, 2010.
^
abMathieson, Kenny (2002). Cookin' Hard Bop and Soul Jazz, 1954–65. Edinburgh: Canongate.
ISBN9780857866165.
^Price, Emmett G. (2010). Encyclopedia of African American Music. Oxford: Greenwood.
ISBN9780313341991.
^Erlewine, Michael; Bogdanov, Vladimir; Woodstra, Chris; Yanow, Scott, eds. (2002). All Music Guide to Jazz (4th ed.). San Francisco: Backbeat.
ISBN9780879307172.
^Schuller, Gunther (1999). Musings (1st Da Capo Press ed.). New York: Da Capo.
ISBN9780306809026.
^Kirchner, Bill (2005). The Oxford companion to jazz. New York: Oxford University Press.
ISBN9780195183597.
^Cooke, Mervyn; Horn, David (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Jazz. Cambridge Companions to Music (1 ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN9780521663205.
^Lambert, Philip (2013). Alec Wilder. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. p. 63.
ISBN9780252094842.
^Do Nascimento Silva, Luis Carlos (2000). Put Your Dreams Away. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
ISBN0313310556.
^Summers, Claude (2004). The Queer Encyclopedia of Music, Dance & Musical Theater (1st ed.). San Francisco: Cleis Press. pp. 165–166.
ISBN9781573441988.
Bruce Brubaker. "Surrounded by this Incredible Vortex of Musical Expression: A Conversation with Gunther Schuller", Perspectives of New Music, Volume 49, Number 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 172-181