He was a composer, a performer, a conductor, an educator, and an administrator. At 15, he played French horn professionally with the American Ballet Theatre. The next year, he became principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony. Then he joined the Metropolitan Orchestra, where he played for well over a decade.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was president of the New England Conservatory. He was also involved with Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony, for over 20 years, serving as its artistic director from 1970 to 1984.
He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1994.
In addition, he cofounded the Modern Jazz Society. He recorded with Miles Davis. He edited and gave the premiere of Charles Mingus’ final work. He wrote two major books on the history of jazz. To describe what he saw as “a new genre of music, located about halfway between classical music and jazz,” he coined the term “Third Stream.”
An American polymath, he was clearly a man who just loved music.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we honor Gunther Schuller, who died on June 21, at the age of 89.
We’ll hear his Bassoon Concerto from 1982. The work, more of a five-movement suite, manages to synthesize atonality, lyricism, blues and Baroque, with some sly quotations from “The Magic Flute,” “The Rite of Spring” and “Peter and the Wolf” along the way.
Schuller also loved the music of Scott Joplin and did much to contribute to the Joplin revival of the 1970s. He founded the New England Ragtime Ensemble, with which he recorded some bestselling albums of Joplin rags. We’ll hear highlights from Joplin’s opera , “Treemonisha,” which Schuller orchestrated for a revival at Houston Grand Opera.
I hope you’ll join me as we salute Third Stream artist Gunther Schuller, on “A Midsummer Night’s Stream,” tonight at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at http://www.wwfm.org.
