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"Schuller, Gunther"
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In memoriam - Gunther Schuller
Composer, orchestra conductor, musicologist and trumpet player Gunther Schuller died on June 21, 2015, at age 89. His career is highlighted.
Journal Article
Gunther Schuller and the Challenge of Sonny Rollins
Scholarly opinion has for many years been divided over Gunther Schuller's landmark 1958 article, “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation.” Jazz theorists view the article's close analysis of Rollins's 1956 jazz saxophone improvisation “Blue 7” as one of their discipline's founding statements; historians and ethnomusicologists meanwhile tend to fault it for neglecting cultural context. In either instance the specific details of Schuller's analysis have been largely accepted as being internally consistent. The present study proposes that the analysis of jazz improvisation ought to engage more extensively with broader stylistic issues in addition to the specifics of isolated individual performances. Such a musically contextualized perspective reveals that Schuller's principal argument—that, in this particular improvisation, Rollins developed motivic elements of a composed theme—is false. “Blue 7” was in fact improvised in its entirety, and the melodic pattern that Schuller cited as a thematic motive was one of Rollins's habitual improvisational formulas, heard on many of the saxophonist's other 1950s recordings. This canonic recording, as well as the notion of Rollins as a “thematic” improviser, therefore needs to be reconsidered.
Journal Article
A Musing on Schuller’s Musings
For many years Gunther Schuller was at the center of the classical music world, as a player, composer, conductor, writer, record producer, polemicist and publisher for new music and jazz, educator, and president of New England Conservatory. His book, entitled, \"Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller: A Collection of His Writings,\" is intriguing as a historical document and deserving of commentary. About the first third of \"Musings\" concerns jazz. These essays are pithy takes on important issues or seminal figures in jazz. Thus, Schuller covers the definition of jazz, its early history, the nature of form--\"We must learn to think of form as a verb rather than a noun\"--and looks at Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Omette Coleman, Paul Whiteman, Scott Joplin, Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz, and Alec Wilder. The remaining two-thirds of \"Musings\" examines the world of contemporary classical music in sections titled \"Music Performance and Contemporary Music\" and \"Music Aesthetics and Education.\" These essays first appeared in print from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, a seminal cultural and musical period. It should come as no surprise that Schuller displays a large degree of growth, even a complete change of viewpoint, during this period.
Journal Article
Surrounded by this Incredible Vortex of Musical Expression: A Conversation with Gunther Schuller
Brubaker interviews celebrated composer, conductor and music historian Gunther Schuller. Schuller discusses the development of musical intuition, the tyranny of musical traditions, and why improvisation always involves some sort of preparation, even if the musician is not consciously aware of it.
Journal Article