A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty by Gunther Schuller (review)

The enormous scale of this book is a shock when it emerges that it’s only the first volume and covers the saga of Schuller’s astonishing career only up to 1960. That leaves more than fifty years still to be covered when Schuller’s multi-faceted life continued in composition and jazz studies but also branched out more widely into conducting, publishing, and important posts in music education. The publisher has put in a disclaimer: ‘This work is a memoir. The experiences and conversations recounted here are the result of the author’s recollections and are rendered as a subjective accounting of events that occurred in his life. His perceptions and opinions are entirely his own and do not represent those of the publisher or sponsors.’ It looks as if this may have been necessary because Schuller, as an orchestral horn player for many years, was in a position to reveal in detail exactly how some of the most famous conductors of the period behaved. Most studies of conductors deal with their recordings, flattering biographies, and their own memoirs. Now Schuller has bravely taken the lid off orchestral rehearsals he played in and the dictatorial behaviour of many conductors is brought into full view, with specific examples. Perhaps this is why Alex Ross, in the blurb, has called the book ‘an essential document of twentieth-century music, in all its forms. Time and again Schuller has been witness to the making of history ... no account of the period will be able to ignore this book.’

Schuller’s introduction refers to the remarkable role of New York City, which gave him access to a rich tapestry of culture in all the arts, and he used it to the full. He was born in 1925 into a German-American background, which provided routes to Europe that conditioned his whole personality. Astonishingly, he sailed on his own to reach German relations at the age of only 6. He returned in 1936, as the Nazi menace was tightening its grip, but his bilingual training was of enormous value throughout his career. While at school in Germany he lost an eye in an accident and it seems incredible that Schuller could still devour films and art exhibitions and maintain a punishing schedule with such a handicap. He was capable of functioning with very little sleep.

Schuller’s father was a second violinist in the New York Philharmonic. When the boy came back from Germany, Barbirolli had just succeeded Toscanini as conductor. It was Barbirolli who suggested that the young Gunther should audition for the choir school at St Thomas’s Church. He was successful and became a chorister under the direction of the British church musician T. Tertius Noble. That brought Schuller into contact with the Anglican choral repertory and he pays tribute to what he learnt from Noble in theory and harmony. His horizons were further extended by attending concerts of the New York Philharmonic with his mother.

Schuller’s epiphany came when he saw the Walt Disney film Fantasia in 1940. He said the Rite of Spring sequence, even in the truncated form used, ‘changed my life. . . . I knew then and there that I had to be a composer’ (p. 47). At this early stage Schuller devoured the Bible, recognized cinema as a work of art, and wrote some anthems, which were published forty years later. Schuller’s sources as a composer were initially in Scriabin (Prometheus), Strauss (Salome), Delius (Sea Drift), Ravel, and later Bartók and Stravinsky, but apart from Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht there were no performances of music by the Second Viennese School and no recordings. In 1936 Schuller first recognized the importance of jazz, which was banned in Hitler’s Germany. That was a defining moment but, of course, so was his choice of the horn in 1942, the instrument through which he earned his living for twenty-one years...