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 Ed (born 1955), a jazz bassist, and George (born 1958), a jazz drummer, survived him, as did 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
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