Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio 
Fall 1999 

Gunther Schuller is scheduled to be MPC 38’s Keynote Speaker in New Orleans. He was in Columbus, Ohio, to perform new works by Russian composers several years ago, and  Bill Munger interviewed him. Technical difficulties prevented the interview from being aired, and it is published here for the first time. This is Part 2 of a two-part interview. Part 1 appeared in the Summer issue of Music Notes. 

In Part 1 of this interview, Schuller talked about twentieth century composers, their tendency to become too intellectual, and how this tendency comes and goes in music history. In this decade he felt it was a lot less but said that he did not know which way the tendency would swing.

In Part 2 of this interview,  Gunther Schuller talks about Ives and about Schuller’s reaction to Mahler, the “Mahler Era,” today’s symphony orchestras, “Third-Stream Music,” jazz, early music, period performance practice, and folk and ethnic music.

MUNGER: I understand that Charles Ives held permanent box seats at concerts of the New York Philharmonic when Mahler was Music Director. What do you suppose he thought of Mahler’s music?

SCHULLER: Boy, that’s a speculation. I don’t know. I think because he was not too fond of the whole German school, including Brahms at the time.

MUNGER: I thought Wagner was an influence in Ives’ first symphony?

SCHULLER: It also sounds like Brahms, or bad Brahms maybe. He admired Brahms intellectually, but I think from an emotional point of view he found German music too thick, too square in a way, rhythmically. But that could also have been because of the way it might have been performed in those days. Those Mahler symphonies, my goodness, they were difficult to play when I was a kid! And we’re talking about the forties. So you can imagine what a struggle that was in New York with Mahler conducting in 1910, 1911. 

What I think is that Ives did hear a lot of music, but what is so fascinating about Ives is that he wasn’t specifically influenced by any composer, whether it was Stravinsky or Mahler or Schoenberg or whatever, once he matured as a composer. He really strode out in his own direction, and that’s why he is one of the great original geniuses and innovators of that time. His music is still in many ways beyond, and especially in terms of complexity and contrapuntal layering and all those sort of things, more advanced than a lot of music that has been written today, especially by the minimalists!

MUNGER: So that’s what excites you about music: continuous innovation. Does Mahler excite you?

SCHULLER: Oh! Of course! He always did. Here again I was a Mahler fan before any of this, all of this, now there’s a Mahler Era! I mean, you can’t turn on the radio without hearing a Mahler symphony. I remember the days when Bruno Walter and Dimitri Mitropoulos would come along once every three years, and they dared to do the Mahler 2nd, you know? You never heard the 6th, the 7th, or the 8th. Of course, Stokowski did it once. 

No, no, I mean you have to understand, I’m crazy, my vision of music is so broad and so all-inclusive, including all the great ethnic and folk and vernacular music of the world. That’s what I’ve always stood for, as you know. So does Mahler turn me on?  Well, he turns me on, I must confess, a little bit less now because now his music is being performed so much and often, so trivialized and bowdlerized or exaggerated in various ways, whereas the great Mahler conductors such as Mitropoulos and Bruno Walter, in their time, gave us something special when they performed. Now everybody gets up and does a Mahler symphony. And I’m not so impressed by all of those performances.

MUNGER: Can you pick performances you’ve favored over the past few decades?

SCHULLER: I have to think. I’m never good at this sort of thing.

MUNGER: James Levine, Leonard Bernstein?

SCHULLER: Neither of those I’m sorry to say. Who else?

MUNGER: Horenstein?  [I too was unable, on the spur of the moment, to think of more recent recordings!]

SCHULLER: Horenstein! But of course he died a few years ago. He was a good Mahler conductor. So was Klemperer when he did Mahler. I’m never good at this. What happens when I get a question like that twenty minutes after the interview, I think I should have thought of so and so. Let’s not pursue this! Ha, ha, ha.

MUNGER: You and Ran Blake set up a World Music Department at The New England Conservatory of Music.

SCHULLER: Yes, it’s called the Third Stream Department; and what’s exciting about that whole movement, including the department there, is that it represents now a huge “broadening” of the Third Stream from the original postulation which I made: that of bringing together jazz and classical music. Well jazz, if you will, is a kind of a folk, a popular, a vernacular type of music, although much of it today is pretty advanced and sophisticated. 
What happened was that the Third-Stream concept became broader to include not just jazz but all kinds of vernacular and popular, folk, and ethnic music. Now creative people, whether they’re performers who are improvising or composers who are writing music, or both, have these incredible profiles. They combine not just one or two, but perhaps three or four musical backgrounds that they, by fate or chance, happen to grow up in. 

I always make an example of an American kid of Greek parentage. Say he grows up in the Greek section of Boston. At age two he gets familiar with bouzouki music and that’s in his blood stream and he can dance in 5/4 and all the irregular rhythms. Then, say, he finds jazz and becomes a very proficient jazz player and improviser. He also goes to Yale or Juilliard and studies Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Now he has these three regions of music. He is familiar with all three and an expert in each. Being a creative person, he naturally is going to express himself automatically in all three. No one can say to him, “Hey, you’re not allowed to mix that bouzouki music with the Schoenberg, you know?” Who says you can’t? How can you even stop someone? If it’s in your heart, your brain, and your soul, it’s going to come out. The remaining ques- tion is, how talented is that person? 

The idea of Third Stream by itself, combining musical styles or idioms, does not guarantee the creation of anything of great quality. Nor does it prevent it! It’s like any other style or concept. It depends [on] who does it. And if that person, this American-born Greek musician, is very talented, then surely some fantastic new musical amalgam will emerge from those three genres that could never have happened before.

MUNGER: Has the Conservatory spawned any ethnic groups such as Muzsikas, Libana, Ad Vielle Que Pourra, Sabia, or Sukay?

SCHULLER: Except for the Klezmer Band which started during my last year, I’m sorry to report that many of the ethnic music groups and the various kinds of jazz groups (I had a Paul Whiteman Orchestra, a Duke Ellington Orchestra, all kinds of things)—a lot of that has (con triste) disappeared. I’ve been away from the Conservatory for [over twenty] years now, and I’m sorry to say that under the new regime(s) some of these projects have been dropped by the wayside. I guess they consider them to be extra or peripheral, including the early music. I had a big medieval and Renaissance department. The many sides of Gunther Schuller have become more one-sided! 

MUNGER: Did you have a gamelan?

SCHULLER: Ya! Yes we had. The present Dean of the School was in fact trained in India and also in Indonesia in his younger years, so [we offered training in both Indian and Indonesian music].

MUNGER: A Chinese Light Orchestra?

SCHULLER: No [laughter], we didn’t get around to that!

MUNGER: I’ve heard that symphony orchestras today play a whole step higher than they did centuries ago.

SCHULLER: It’s actually a minor third higher.

MUNGER: How does that affect the so-called authentic or original or period performances that are recorded by Chris-topher Hogwood, Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner, and others.

SCHULLER: Well, they haven’t gone that far in transposing the music down to its former level. The people who have done that, however, are those who work strictly in medieval music or early Renaissance. But when you’re talking about Norrington, Hogwood, and Gardiner, then you’re talking, 
of course, about the Classical or Baroque era. The pitch had already risen to some extent centuries earlier. I have no strong feelings whether or not one should do that or not do it. It would mean rebuilding a lot of instruments. 

You know the reason the pitch has risen in the last three or four centuries, very gradually, is that the music scene has changed. Concerts were essentially very private affairs, where somebody played for royalty, or for the duke of so and so, or a king, or something, and always in small venues, in churches, and so on. As music became a part of democratic societies and audiences grew, concert halls were built to house two or three thousand people. Instrumentalists felt they needed more edge in order to project to those larger audiences. There was a sense that if one played higher, the music would project more brilliantly. 

By the way, that process is still going on. There are orchestras in the world who play quite high compared to where you’re supposed to be, something called A-440. Well, I’ve been with some orchestras, including the Boston Symphony, playing at 445. The pitch is creeping up even as we speak. I don’t know where it will end. However, a certain amount of stabilization is present because of recordings, radio, and television, so that most orchestras are settled at a certain pitch.

MUNGER: I’ve felt that twentieth century composers, most notably Mahler and Strauss, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, seem to have strings that are more piercing than earlier composers.

SCHULLER: That depends on who’s playing, I would say. I don’t think that’s inherent in their composition. Orchestras around the world all used to have their own individual sounds and sonority, really strikingly different. Some orchestras had a much brighter, lighter sound, some of the French orchestras particularly. Some of the German or Viennese orchestras had more of a deep, dark sound. English orchestras had a very outgoing, projecting kind of bright sound. All of that is beginning to disappear because of recordings, radio, and television that I just mentioned. Everything is beginning to be leveled off to the same common denominator. However, there is still some difference. When I conduct in Paris, some of the music they play, such as Prokofiev or Ravel, they do play with a lighter, brighter sound to this day. But it’s interesting that even in Paris, where earlier they didn’t want to know anything about German musicians, there’s been an infiltration of German-style playing. I kind of deplore the trend leading to the disappearance of the old distinctions. We’ll soon have, what would we call it, a “megaorchestra”— one huge orchestra that sounds all the same?

MUNGER: That seems to be true in jazz as well. I am enthusiastic about the increased interest in Bebop on the part of  younger musicians. However, I am looking forward to some, as you mentioned with orchestras, individual voices. Do you think they’re coming?

SCHULLER: Seems not. That’s a very interesting situation. We are in an absolutely unique and unprecedented juncture in the history of jazz. I would describe it as a trade-off.  Earlier the whole motivation of any talented jazz musician was to develop her or his own absolutely distinctive individual style in all respects of playing, technically, sonically, and so on. And that, particularly for black musicians, was how they rose in society and became famous, such as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, or whoever. There was no school education. Those musicians were either self-taught or learned right in the big bands. The big bands were the traveling conservatories, so they developed their own personality. 

Now, since World War II, and certainly more recently in the last ten or fifteen years, almost every jazz musician that’s below the age of thirty or forty has gone to years of school! At jazz schools, conservatories, university music departments, they’ve learned, not just jazz, by the way, but classical and other forms of music. That in a way is wonderful, because now those musicians have extremely diverse abilities. They can play any kind of music, any kind of jazz. They can play Dixieland, they can play Swing, they can play Bebop, Avant-Garde, Free Jazz, whatever. 

Today someone in the orchestra reminded me that I once performed in concert with Coleman Hawkins and others of his generation in 1962. He was such a great musician, one of the great artists of our time. But you couldn’t get him to do anything other than what he did or what he wanted to do. You couldn’t give him any other music. There was no other sound or style, nothing. That’s how strong he was as an individual creator. Today, younger players can play like Wynton Marsalis or anyone. They can play any kind of music beautifully, perfectly; but that strong individualism has now disappeared because they have spread themselves so thin, so wide. That worries me because, there again, it seems to me, we have an either/or situation. We had another kind of either/or situation in the thirties, and I can’t quite figure out why we can’t have a little of both. 

MUNGER: I guess people want to cut records and play within a concept that sells them or that appeals to CD producers. It seems to me that there are a lot of different footsteps to follow. For instance I have yet to hear a trumpet player pick up where Rex Stewart left off with his sticky valves or a pianist start where Thelonius Monk stopped.  And just as Dizzy developed from Roy Eldridge, Chet from Bix, Zoot and Getz from Prez, Ellington from Pops, Jelly Roll, Sidney Bechet, et al., there are a lot of avenues!

SCHULLER: I think it’s more than that though. I don’t think that it’s always the CD producers who dominate the situation. There are musicians who simply haven’t got the creative talent to be that individual. I mean, let’s face it, when we talk about Coleman Hawkins and Louis Armstrong and Ben Webster and Duke Ellington, and we’ll name another six or seven more, we’re talking about some very rare geniuses, and there weren’t so many of those beyond those twelve we might name, right? So that kind of high-level innovation and creativity is always in relatively short supply. And that’s what we were talking about before with classical music, that one percent. 

So today that isn’t any different; and therefore, we mustn’t expect too many people to be even inherently that creative or that talented that they could develop their own style. But then what’s been added to the problem is that they have been obliged by their profession and the need to make a living to be more broadly oriented than Coleman Hawkins could afford to be. So there are two forces that have been working against these younger players. 

Now Wynton, of course, may well be the one exception. I happen to be very close to him. I brought him to Tangle-wood when he was seventeen years old, and we have been very good friends and colleagues for all these years. He is now beginning to strike out on his own in composition. After all his studying and absorbing all these earlier traditions, he may have that individuality. He certainly has the talent. That is rare. Let’s hope there will be others.

MUNGER: You’ve done so much for our increased appreciation of Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, and I know you love and respect the music of Thelonius Monk. Do you have any plans to bring his music to a wider audience?

SCHULLER: Yes, I plan to do a lot of that not just with Monk but with George Russell and all kinds of major composers in association with the orchestra I helped found: the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra in Washington. In the summer of our first year in a short season we covered a fantastic amount of repertoire in seven weekends, playing everything from Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman to Woody Herman and Dizzy Gillespie. In the second year we went beyond the thirties and forties and the big band era to the music of Monk. This was a tremendous challenge. You talk about an individualist, my lord. The challenge here is to perform his music authentically. I am not interested in just a potpourri or a pastiche of Monk pieces, but in a recreation of the music the way it sounded and the way I heard it.