Gunther Schuller

Gunther Alexander Schuller (November 22, 1925 – June 21, 2015) was an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, educator, publisher, and jazz musician.

Schuller was born in Queens, New York City, the son of German parents Elsie (Bernartz) and Arthur E. Schuller, a violinist with the New York Philharmonic.

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.

During his youth, he attended the Precollege Division at the Manhattan School of Music, later going on to teach at the school.

But, already a high school dropout because he wanted to play professionally, Schuller never obtained a degree from any institution.

He married Marjorie Black, a singer and pianist, in 1948, and the marriage lasted until her death in 1992.

His sons George and Ed survive him, as does his brother Edgar.

He began his career in jazz by recording as a horn player with Miles Davis (1949–50).

In 1955, Schuller and jazz pianist John Lewis founded the Modern Jazz Society, 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.

He became an enthusiastic advocate of this style and wrote many works according to its principles, among them Transformation (1957, for jazz ensemble), Concertino (1959, for jazz quartet and orchestra), Abstraction (1959, for nine instruments), and Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk (1960, for 13 instruments) utilizing Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman.

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.

Schuller wrote over 190 original compositions in many musical genres.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Schuller was president of New England Conservatory, where he founded The New England Ragtime Ensemble.

During this period, he also held a variety of positions at the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home in Tanglewood, serving as director of new music activities from 1965 to 1969 and as artistic director of the Tanglewood Music Center from 1970 to 1984 and creating the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.

In 1966, he composed the opera The Visitation.

He was the author of two major books on the history of jazz, Early Jazz (1968) and The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930-1945.

His students included Irwin Swack, Ralph Patt, John Ferritto, Mohammed Fairouz, Gitta Steiner, Oliver Knussen, Nancy Zeltsman, Riccardo Dalli Cardillo and hundreds of others.

In the 1970s and 1980s Schuller founded the publishers Margun Music and Gun-Mar and the record label GM Recordings.

He also orchestrated Scott Joplin's only known surviving opera Treemonisha for the Houston Grand Opera's premiere production of this work in 1975.

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."

Schuller's association with Spokane began with guest conducting the Spokane Symphony for one week in 1982.

He then served as Music Director from 1984 to 1985 and later regularly appeared as a guest conductor.

Schuller also served as Artistic Director to the nearby Festival at Sandpoint.

Schuller was editor-in-chief of Jazz Masterworks Editions, and co-director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra 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.

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.

Margun Music and Gun-Mar were sold to Music Sales Group in 1999.

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."

Other notable performances Schuller conducted at the festival include the St Matthew Passion in 2008 and Handel's Messiah in 2005.

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.

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.

In 2011 Schuller published the first volume of a two-volume autobiography, Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty.

In 2012, Schuller premiered a new arrangement, the Treemonisha suite from Joplin's opera.

It was performed as part of The Rest is Noise season at London's South Bank in 2013.

Schuller died on June 21, 2015, in Boston, from complications from leukemia.