Conducting Business At 70, Gunther Schuller Is Leading A Very Busy Life Full Of Ambitious Projects

Gunther Schuller celebrated his 70th birthday the day before Thanksgiving. If he was true to character, he probably spent most of the day working.

No other American musician has led such a comprehensively busy and productive life. The usual short list of Schuller’s activities includes his work as composer, conductor, writer, instrumentalist, editor, music publisher, record-company executive and producer - and, in all things he does, educator.

Through the decades, Schuller has engaged in all these activities across a remarkable range of music: classical, operatic and jazz in particular, with an unrivaled record of dedication to forgotten American music and to young composers, especially Americans.

For 11 invigorating years (1966-77), Schuller served as president of the New England Conservatory, and Boston is still reaping the rewards of his tenure there. A particularly inquisitive, adventurous and countercultural breed of faculty and students was attracted to the conservatory because of Schuller’s presence, and many of them have stayed on; to a very significant extent, Boston’s musical scene is the astonishingly rich thing it is because of Gunther Schuller.

(He also has had an immense impact on the Inland Northwest. Schuller was the artistic director and principal conductor of the Spokane Symphony in 1984-85, and he has been the artistic director of the Festival at Sandpoint since 1985 and the Northwest Bach Festival since 1993.)

This week the New England Conservatory is presenting a special three-day festival to honor the birthday boy. Sunday and Monday there were programs of chamber music and small-ensemble pieces. Today, Schuller himself returns to the podium to conduct his Second Piano Concerto, a work he composed in 1981 for Veronica Jochum, and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. The latter work first seized Schuller’s imagination when he was 13 and bought the massive set of 78s conducted by Bruno Walter, who conducted the world premiere of the symphony after the composer’s death. Later, during his days as a leading horn virtuoso, Schuller played in nowlegendary performances of the symphony by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Dimitri Mitropoulos.

Symphony’s ambiguities

In a lunchtime conversation after a rehearsal a week ago, Schuller said, “I conducted the Mahler Ninth for the first time 20 years ago, with the Springfield Symphony, and I was aware even then of how many ambiguous or unclarified details there are in the orchestral parts, but with only a handful of rehearsals I didn’t have the time to deal with them. But now I have spent the last 3 weeks working on the parts - I put 148 hours into editing them and resolving the ambiguities, or preserving them. Often one group of instruments is making a crescendo while another is making a decrescendo - this creates a special tonal color that is completely lost in most performances….”

“When the conservatory asked me what I would like to conduct for my birthday, I thought of this piece immediately. I felt really ready, really ripe, and I am delighted with the responsiveness of the students so far. They want to make the effort to learn this piece. That’s part of the conductor’s job - to teach the music. It’s not about ‘What a great Mahler Ninth I’m going to do.’ It’s about how understanding this music can change your life.”

As it happens, Schuller has recently completed what ought to be the major book of our time on conducting; he has already produced two definitive volumes on the history of jazz. The new book is called “The Compleat Conductor,” and it will be more than 600 pages long, with more than 800 musical examples. Oxford University Press will bring it out in the spring.

“It is a book about conducting as an interpretive art, about what conductors do to the music,” Schuller said.

Schuller wrote the book during an unusual burst of compositional creativity. After his wife, Marjorie, died in 1992, Schuller found himself temporarily unable to write music; after 10 months of silence, the floodgates burst, and he has completed 11 pieces in the past two years, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning tribute to his wife, “Of Reminiscences and Reflections.”

Beethoven project

Schuller, who never admits to exhaustion, does say that after all this, he feels the need to redirect his energies for a while. One project particularly close to his heart is Russell Sherman’s ongoing recording of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas for Schuller’s GM label. The first six will be out after the first of the year. Sherman has recorded another six, with sessions for an additional half-dozen scheduled in the immediate feature.

“What Russell proposed to me was a unique collaboration between a pianist/interpreter who loves Beethoven and a composer/producer who also loves Beethoven,” Schuller said.

Schuller keeps busy as a commuting conductor who knows every airport in the musical world. He is particularly proud of the opportunity that came last summer to conduct Wagner’s “Parsifal” in Australia.

“I played in this opera 80 times, but this was the first opportunity I have had to conduct it, with many rehearsals, the best Bayreuth cast, and the chance to take a provincial orchestra and let them prove that they could play like gods,” he said.

Schuller admits that he is pleased he has finally broken through the typecasting that implied he was fit only to conduct new works and classic American compositions like the Ives symphonies.

“Now I am invited to conduct Bach and the Beethoven Ninth,” he said. “There are still pieces I would love to put my composer’s mind to, like Wagner’s ‘Tristan’ and ‘Die Goetterdaemmerung,’ and there are pieces that aren’t programmed very often that I simply must conduct again, like Delius’ ‘Sea Drift,’ Scriabin’s ‘Prometheus’ and Ravel’s ‘L’Enfant et les sortileges.”’

Another recent triumph for Schuller was James Levine’s decision to record his “Spectra” with the Chicago Symphony for Deutsche Grammophon.

“That was written in 1958,” he said, “and I believe it is one of my very best pieces, written at a crucial point of my life.

“What I would like to do now is make a new recording of my ‘Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee.’ It is still my greatest hit, but the only recordings were made in 1959 and in 1960, and all of us have learned more about it in the intervening years. No, I had no idea when I was writing it that it would become as popular as it did, although I know that if you do anything with literary or visual connections, the public is more receptive. No one is interested anymore in a piece with a title like ‘Composition in Three Parts.”’

At 70, Schuller is still full of ambitious projects. Everyone wants to see a third volume of the jazz history, but Schuller knows that if he does it, he will have to alter the format.

“The first two volumes were in intent, and to a large extent in accomplishment, comprehensive; I listened to more than 35,000 records. To carry the story forward I would have to listen to millions more, and I cannot make myself a slave to that. What I have in mind is a very selective book, with separate essays or studies of individual jazz greats in the later generations.”

But before that, Schuller wants to write an autobiography.

“What I want to do is share with people the richness of my life, which has been spent working on both sides of the musical fence,” he said.. “Toscanini was my first conductor, and I played with or knew virtually every significant conductor since.

“At the same time, I knew and worked with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Lewis, and I can’t think of anybody else who can say that. My two sons are jazz musicians, and they represent the sixth generation of musicians in my family. It’s been an incredible experience, and I want to set it all down.”

Schuller continues, “I have recently been astonished to discover a tremendous streak of nostalgia in me for my early life, its great discoveries and epiphanies, and I want to experience them again - not just musical ones, but Shakespeare, Proust, El Greco, Titian, and the filmmaker Jean Vigo. The ‘40s and the ‘50s were an incredibly rich, great period in our national cultural history, when so many things came together; I would like to reconnect to myself in that era and to the other people.

“A lot of it has to do with my wife, because I experienced all of these things with her, and as I relive them, it’s as if I could bring her back.”

Maintaining standards

No individual has done more than Schuller to make this a better world for music, for musicians and for music lovers. Schuller knows he has fought a ferocious battle, but things are getting worse, not better.

“The music business is full of degradation and corruption, and I am deeply worried about the lowering of standards in every part of the performing arena,” he said. “We continue to produce the most wonderful talents, but they are terribly vulnerable to the inroads commercialism has made everywhere.

“The other day I heard a recording by one of the most highly praised young violinists. There was not one authentic nuance in her entire performance, and that sort of thing has become commonplace in our world. The danger is that young musicians need to know the best and the purest, but they have less and less chance to do that, surrounded and inundated as they are by the worst.

“It’s depressing, but I am an eternal optimist, and I believe it is important to keep slugging it out, to fight the good fight, even if we are outnumbered. My bedrock belief is that the best, strongest, purest talent will always survive.”