Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com
parentage. My parents were German, but they had emigrated to America and my father was in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. I was a slightly unruly, rebellious child, so they placed me in a boarding school in Germany. [Pictured: The 1941 New York Philharmonic bass section]
be best for me. Besides, both of my parents had relatives there, so on vacations I would stay with them. I attended that school from January 1932 until December 1936. I had an incredible education there. In the second grade I was studying subjects like French, Latin, geography and geology. [Pictured: German countryside]
happening there. By definition, these private schools for foreign children with German parents were sealed off from outside distractions, and Hitler had promised to leave them undisturbed. However, since Hitler never kept any agreement that he had made, he invaded all those private schools in 1936.
uselessly up and down outside, with the commandant beating us severely once a week. I wrote my parents about what was going on there, but they were in disbelief. They were 3,000 miles away in New York. Even in America, people in the 1930s were in disbelief that Hitler was really that bad or evil.
how my mother felt when she heard the news. I had to leave the school, of course, and my mother had to come to Germany to take me home to New York. In those days there were no airplanes crossing the Atlantic, so it took her seven days to get there. I’ve had an artificial right eye ever since.
three years. The school was nearly as rigorous as the one in Germany, so I had little time for anything more than my studies. What I am today is largely a result of the education I had in Germany and New York.
teaching for graduation in my earlier private schools. That’s how I wound up becoming a professional French horn player at age 16 and playing with Arturo Toscanini in the New York Philharmonic.
would explode in these outbursts, these scatological fits with Italian curse words. It was frightening to work with him. But he was such a great musician and conductor. We played extremely well with him. But if he landed on you, you were in trouble. [Photo of Arturo Toscanini conducting Metropolitan Opera stars in 1946 by W. Eugene Smith for Life]
just happened to be Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony,which was composed in 1941. Toscanini didn’t know the symphony as well as he knew works by Wagner, Beethoven and Rossini. I came away unscathed [laughs].
symphony, you see, has eight horns instead of the usual four. I was hired as one of the extra players. But I was scared. I was just 16 years old and I feared he’d look around, see me and say, “What is this little kid doing in this orchestra?”
father was always sitting by. But I was good. There were a few bad moments. Only once in a great while would he look at me with a sour look. But not in the Shostakovich symphony. I think Toscanini was just glad to have gotten through it.
late operas required eight horns. For those performances, Toscanini would hire the four extra horns he needed from the Metropolitan Opera, where by that time I was playing first horn. That’s how I was able to play with him many times, when he conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra in those Wagner programs. [Photo of Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony in 1947 by Robert Hupka]
explain. My girlfriend, who later became my wife, and I lived the full cultural life of New York, which is now quite gone. New York was, in the late 1930s and 1940s and well into the 50s, the cultural paradise of the world. It was unbelievable in its richness, wit, breadth, depth—and I feasted on that. It was so mesmerizing. It's almost impossible to describe the energy and excitement today. [Pictured: Women with Statue at the Museum of Modern Art in 1948 by Ruth Orkin]
four hours’ sleep. Whenever we were free, we’d see three or four films showing at the Museum of Modern Art. I was obsessed with the art of film—the great films from Germany and France from the 1920s and 1930s. We went to all the museums and galleries, saw performances of all kinds. We went to jazz clubs. We did everything. We just ate up the entire cultural ambiance of New York at the time.Reprinted from http://jazzwax.com
![Schuller-Gunther-05[1950s]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vd2hdNi2wDBMtQ62Pxb3zrDmX174O2BgVx70EpkM2h8VfMovq0iJVqsiYqGTaFSk4H6oPAr7Q1v_sR7CJS4w_byos77Ulom3p48lTzNIKajM-mT9I__lgygG3oQaKDO1Gv6B3Dh9DnY5Colw=s0-d "Schuller-Gunther-05[1950s]")
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.
Born: November 22, 1925
The composer Gunther Schuller is, famously, a man of many musical pursuits. He began his professional life as a horn player in both the jazz and classical worlds, working as readily with Miles Davis and Gil Evans as with Toscanini; he was principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony from age sixteen and later of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra until 1959.
In the 1950s he began a conducting career focusing largely on contemporary music, and thereafter conducted most of the major orchestras of the world in a wide range of works, including his own. He was central in precipitating a new stylistic marriage between progressive factions of jazz and classical, coining the term “Third Stream” and collaborating in the development of the style with John Lewis, the Modem Jazz Quartet, and others.
An educator of extraordinary influence, he has been on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University; he was, for many years, head of contemporary music activities (succeeding Aaron Copland) as well as a director of the Tanglewood Music Center, and served as President of the New England Conservatory. He has published several books and recently embarked on the writing of his memoirs.
In the late 1970s he started the GunMar and Margun music publishing companies and later the GM Recordings label. (The GunMar/ Margun catalogs are now part of G. Schirmer/Music Sales/AMP.) Composition has had a continual central presence in Schuller's musical life: he has written more than 180 works dating back to the beginning of his career when, at age nineteen, he was soloist in his own Horn Concerto with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Eugene Goosens. His works range from solo works to concertos, symphonies, and opera, and many fall outside of any genre (for which reason there can be no such thing as a brief and comprehensive overview of his output).
Gunther Schuller's orchestral works include some of the classics of the modern repertoire written for the major orchestras of the world. Prominent among these are several masterful examples in the “Concerto for Orchestra” genre, though not all of them take that title. An early example is Spectra (1958), commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the orchestra's departing music director Dimitri Mitropoulos. Schuller reconfigured musical space by organizing the ensemble onstage into smaller chamber groups within the larger orchestra, and also concentrated on instrumental timbre as a defining aspect of the piece's form and expression; both of these aspects were cutting-edge for the time, foreshadowing concerns of later composers. Spectra remains a compelling orchestral essay alongside such other works as the Concerto for Orchestra No. 1: Gala Music (1966), written for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Concerto for Orchestra No. 2 (1976) for the National Symphony Orchestra; and Farbenspiel (Concerto for Orchestra No. 3) (1985), written for the Berlin Philharmonic. The title of the latter, translatable as “play of colors,” echoes the visual metaphor of Spectra.
Many of Schuller's other purely orchestral works draw explicitly on visual influences while invoking the Impressionist and late Romantic tone poems of Debussy and Schoenberg. These include one of his most popular pieces, Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959), which Schuller describes as a “translation” into musical terms of several paintings which were Klee's own translations of musical themes into the visual realm. Seven Studies was written for and premiered by the Minneapolis Orchestra. A later work, An Arc Ascending (1996), was inspired by photographs by Alice Weston. Orchestral works of similar origin are his Four Soundscapes (Hudson River Reminiscences) and Shapes and Designs.
Only one of Schuller's large orchestral pieces takes the generic title of “symphony”: his colorful Symphony 1965, written for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and premiered that year. Schuller himself, however, has described his Of Reminiscences and Reflections (1993) as a “symphony for large orchestra.” Written for the Louisville Orchestra and winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Of Reminiscences and Reflections is Schuller's large-scale memorial to his wife of 49 years, Marjorie Black. (Another orchestral tribute to Marjorie is The Past Is the Present, written for the centennial of the Cincinnati Symphony and premiered in May 1994.) One of his first works performed by a major orchestra was his Symphony for Brass and Percussion, played in 1949 by Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic; his Symphony No. 3, In Praise of Winds (1981) is also for wind ensemble. He has also written a Chamber Symphony and a work for solo organ titled, simply, Symphony.
