The World According to Gunther Schuller

The truly gifted composer, conductor, arranger, performer and friend, at work creating the Birth of the Cool Suite for Joe Lovano's Blue Note CD, Streams of Expression.

It seems safe to say that at this stage in his life and career, Gunther Schuller represents, for countless musicians, concertgoers, and record buyers around the world, American music making at its best, almost as much as Leonard Bernstein did a half century earlier. He is composer, conductor, horn player, jazz performer, writer, administrator, publisher, and teacher, all wrapped up into one tidy bundle of seemingly endless energy. Like American music itself, however, Schuller has not always steered clear of controversy -- the very masses that admire him have sometimes been baffled by his uncompromising attitudes and blunt statements.

His father played violin in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for many decades, and it was he who oversaw Schuller's early training. Schuller mastered the French horn with remarkable speed as a student at the Manhattan School of Music (1939-1941) -- in 1942, aged just 16, his horn playing was heard across the country in the American radio premiere of Shostakovich's then brand-new "Leningrad" Symphony. A series of high-profile orchestra jobs followed: first the American Ballet Theater Orchestra, then the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and then 14 seasons in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. During the 1950s Schuller became interested in jazz and made a name for himself as a performer in that field, playing with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and other jazz stars; in the years to come, Schuller combined jazz and traditional composition in new ways -- something that he called "third stream music." After the 1958-1959 season, Schuller gave up his career at the Met to build a new career as a composer.

Success in the sometimes persnickety world of American serious composition came to Schuller nearly as easily and quickly as success as a performer did, and by 1964 he was on the composition faculty of Yale University. He has also taught and administered at the Manhattan School of Music, the New England Conservatory, and Tanglewood.

In 1975 he founded his own record label and music publishing companies, GM Recordings and Margun Music (the names are drawn from the first names of Schuller and his wife Marjorie Black). He has also written several books, including the cherished manual Horn Playing (London and New York, 1962) and the landmark studies Early Jazz: Its Roots and Development (London and New York, 1968) and The Swing Era: the Development of Jazz 1930-45 (New York and Oxford, 1989). In 1997 he poured his many years' experience as a professional conductor into The Compleat Conductor.

As a composer, Schuller ranks among the most eclectic of his generation or any other. Schoenberg's techniques meet jazz meets Stravinskian rhythmicism meets Haydn in ways that one could never imagine without the score on the table. And his output is very large: 20-plus concertos for solo instrument(s) and orchestra, several dozen other orchestral items (including the 1965 Symphony and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning Of Reminiscences and Reflections), better than 70 miscellaneous chamber pieces for ensembles and combinations of all kinds, a pair of operas, and a library of arrangements of other composers' music.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• joe lovano
• gunter schuller
• birth of the cool
• miles davis
• french horn

[DJkebu]

lol i thought this was Günther :D

[johncho12]

Gunther Schuller came to our high school (lexington high), and our wind ensemble commissioned his piece - "Nature's Way" (song written for high school level, but ended being grade 5). It was crazy hard and super intense and we were scared that he was gonna be mean but he was such a funny guy...

[gtralisfr69]

Someone recommend me some of Schullers music for someone just getting in to him please?

[thedragonslayerking]

ya me too

[maxk880]

me too

[Nomeutenteaccedi]

PCDO

[bordaz1]

i'm pretty sure an OCD has something to do with it, how else is it possible?

[4juxtapose4]

hey do you know what he is doing nowadays? i'm doing a metriculation major work on his baby, third stream music...

[CliffX]

This guy came to OSU and gave a pep talk to aspiring conductors such as myself. His advice on translating Sibelius? "You don't fuck around with this stuff."

Truly an inspiration.

[mitropoulos]

More than gifted. Something of a biological freak. How many can have the chops to be able to conduct the premiere of Moondreams, the Australian premiere of Wagner's Parsifal, play horn in the American premiere of Shostakovich 7 under TOscanini and write all the Schuller output, conduct the Metropolitan Opera AND the New York Philharmonic in the same evening, AND revive rgtime still have time to run a major conservatory and a great music festival at the same time.