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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gunther Schuller (born November 22, 1925) is an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, and jazz musician.
The son of a violinist with the New York Philharmonic, he studied at the Saint Thomas Choir School and became an accomplished horn player and flute player. At age 15 he played horn professionally with the American Ballet Theatre (1943) followed by an appointment as principal hornist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (1943-5), 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. He began his career in jazz by recording as a french 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 in Town Hall, New York, that 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; one of its movements, Progression in Tempo, has sometimes been performed separately), Abstraction (1959, for nine instruments), the opera The Visitation (1966), and Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk (1960, for 13 instruments).
In 1959 Schuller gave up performance to devote himself to composition, teaching and writing. He has conducted internationally and studied and recorded jazz with such greats as Dizzy Gillespie and John Lewis among many others. Schuller has written over 160 original compositions.
In the 1960s, Schuller was president of New England Conservatory. He is the author of two major books on the history of jazz.
Since 1993, Schuller has served as Artistic Director for the Northwest Bach Festival in Spokane, Washington. He then served as Music Director from 1984 - 1985 and has since regularly appeared as a guest conductor. Schuller also serves as Artistic Director to the nearby Festival at Sandpoint.
His modernist orchestral work "Where the World Ends", organized in four movements corresponding to those of a symphony, premiered at the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2009.
In 2011 Schuller published the first volume of a two-volume autobiography, Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty.
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