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Library of Congress (Music Division)

Gunther Schuller interviewed by at on April 21, 1998. Part 1.

Transcript of recorded interview: interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Hi, Gunther. How are you? Gunther Schuller: Don’t tell me you’re taking a picture of an old man creeping up the stairs. Hi Ellen. ETZ: Good to see you. GS: Thank you, yeah, good to see you. Hello. So… ETZ: So you… GS: …this is where I can rediscover most of my Carnegie hall life. ETZ: Practically your whole life here. You weren’t born in the trunk in the back were you, or anything? [Both laugh] GS: Yeah, that’s what it used to look like So…

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

ETZ: …archives here. GS: Yeah, let me see that Carnegie Hall . . . that NBC program. I mean the Shostakovich Seventh. ETZ: The…here it is. Go ahead. GS: Oh. ETZ: I always find these so interesting for the ads and the… GS: So how did you come upon this? I mean, you read that I had done this somewhere or? ETZ: I must have, yes. And…I mean it seems incredibly early for you, but then… GS: No, no. [ETZ laughs] I was just trying to recall, I did a concert even before this one, where there was - I just thought of this this morning in the car with Robert – in which I believe we did the American premiere of the Ives’s Fourth, First Symphony. And it was, it was an orchestra that played maybe four or five times a year and I don’t know what it was called. ETZ: This was in the early ‘40s? GS: In ’42.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

ETZ: My goodness. GS: Yeah, Ives’s First Symphony. I believe, if it wasn’t the first performance, it must have been the second performance. And I was…the regular horn player was not available and I was hired. And I remember it was Ives’s First. So two important premieres when I was sixteen. ETZ: Yeah. That’s a heavy experience. Being a sixteen-year-old, although I bet you took it right in . GS: Oh yeah. I was so busy, because primarily, of course, I was composing. The new opera company, look at this. My god. Boy. It…this is all a little…or it’s been confusing in my mind because Toscanini did it twice. I mean, I think he did it again…I don’t know, I don’t know whether this is actually the performance, because he…I think he first did it with the NBC Symphony and then he did it with the Philharmonic. ETZ: Wasn’t there like a… GS: But it was in Carnegie Hall, nonetheless, so there might be one earlier than this. Is that possible? ETZ: It certainly is, we just really looked for the Philharmonic. As I understand it, Shostakovich became something of a folk hero, that his picture was on Time Magazine with a fireman’s hat following the siege of Leningrad and…that there was a great struggle to get the first performance of the symphony here. GS:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

Oh, between Stokowski and Koussevitzky, they fought over this. No, I know that story, yeah, but the question is whether this is the actual first performance. ETZ: Doesn’t it say? GS: And I once talked to Howard Shanet about it and he seemed to know the details of it and I’ve never had time in my hectic life to check this out, but obviously I will. You know, I’m writing my autobiography, so I have to check all this stuff. Here it is. [reading]…requests the audience to join in singing of…Zirato, Jesus. Yeah. No one has indexed this yet, I assume, [laughs] these books. ETZ: They’re…not, not completely, no, but they’re working on all kinds of things yeah. GS: At least for the programs, maybe. ETZ: There’s a lot of work to be done and a lot being done. GS: I can imagine. ETZ: For the record, I’m Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Today is… GS: [To Bruce] Hey, Bruce. ETZ: …April 21st, 1998 and Bruce must have just walked in. Hi, Bruce. How are you doing? B: Hey, how are you. Hi, Gunther.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

GS: Hi. B: How are you? GS: This guy always disappears just when I get someplace…[ETZ laughs]…like St., like St. Lou[is], but this time you didn’t. B: …stuck around. GS: Listen, you were right about Tony’s. Just fantastic. B: Isn’t it good? GS: I went there I think, four – [Break in tape] B: You look well. GS: Yeah, thank you. I feel well con-, well I mean, I shouldn’t because I’ve been traveling incessantly since last October. I, I figured out I’ve been home cumulatively only 17 days since last October. B: Wow. GS: And that was like one day between trips, or two days. I must never do this again. ETZ: It’s deadly. GS: Not, not…you know I love traveling, but airlines are such a pain in the ass. ETZ: And airports are worse.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

GS: Yeah, I mean, it’s ridiculous. B: I had two planes cancelled yesterday getting back from the Midwest. ETZ: Oh, that’s nice. GS: Yeah, no, it’s no fun. And I started flying in 1943, so I know what it was like in the old days, you know, and it’s just no fun anymore. ETZ: It used to be civilized. GS: Even if you go… B: You have to get Gunther to tell you about the concert that the band played. Remember Eubie Blake… GS: Yeah. B: …waving from… GS: The center box, sure. B: …who did the orchestration of, gosh, Charleston Rag. GS: Charleston Rag. B: Charleston Rag. There was Eubie Blake, he must have been 95 or 96 at the time. GS: Well, we could figure it out, but, let’s see. I think he was a little…maybe he was in his upper 80s or something, but…

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

ETZ: A mere child. GS: But…and…yeah, that was a nice occasion. ETZ: He lived into his hundreds, didn’t he? GS: But, I…don’t remember what year that would have been. Was I still president? B: Oh yeah, it would have been seventy… GS: Four. Five. B: …five or ’76. ETZ: This was the New England Ragtime Ensemble when Gunther was president of the New England Conservatory. Somebody who’s watching this years from now… B: So where he got me through graduate school by, by letting me play ragtime band. [ETZ laughs] We had a good time. It was a great time. Well, listen, I’ll let you get to it. So, I’ll see you later. GS: Alright, good to see you. ETZ: Bye, Bruce. Back to the record. Today is April 21st, 1998. We’re in the archives of Carnegie Hall and we’re here today with Gunther Schuller. Check me out on this list, Gunther. Composer, conductor, author, educator, administrator, publisher, record producer, did I forget something? GS: historian.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

ETZ: Jazz, well, okay. Under author, jazz historian. Your honors include a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Genius Award, the Max Rudolf Award of the Conductors Guild, Down Beat Hall of Fame for contributions to jazz. Gunther Schuller is someone who’s composed an absolutely remarkable life in music. As a composer, I would say, first of all. GS: Yeah, sure. ETZ: But, a conductor who’s conducted all the major orchestras of our time and…a musical thinker, a music citizen. It’s really…it’s been a wonderful life in music and you’ve got a lot more to go. Gunther, let’s race all the way back. You were practically born at Carnegie Hall… GS: [laughs] Yes. ETZ: …born in 1925 and your father had been a member of the violin section for a couple of years, I think. GS: Yeah. Well I’m sure I was here in my mother’s womb. ETZ: I…absolutely. You must have been… GS: …absorbing Tchaikovsky. ETZ: What was it like to be a child of a member of the Philharmonic? What was it like for you father in the orchestra in those days? Making a living basically?

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

GS: Oh, well, I mean the New York Philharmonic was one of the best jobs a musician could have in the United States, I mean, I suppose. ETZ: Maybe there were four or five. GS: Yeah, well, like the same. and Philadelphia, people like that. And my father did come into the orchestra in 1923, when he emigrated from Germany, which was during the years of the worst inflation known to man, I think, even worse than Indonesia these days, where a loaf of bread cost four million marks, and it was half rotten anyway. So anyway, he came to this country with a Wagner opera company and he liked it so much he decided to stay. So I, yeah, I grew up here sort of in the shadow of Carnegie Hall because my father did take me to a lot of concerts, you know, as a child, but one has to take three and a half years out of that because I was in a school in Germany between 1932, when I was seven years old, and 1936. So I wasn’t… ETZ: So you went back with relatives or…? GS: Well, I went to a private school for foreign children, which is a particular… ETZ: In? GS: In Germany. ETZ: Where? GS:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

And there were seven different schools that belonged to this chain, as it were. And my particular school was near Erfurt, where Bach was organist for a while. And I did come back to the United States for little vacations, once in awhile, but mostly I was over there, and when the school was in vacation I stayed with relatives because my mother also came from Germany so I have a…my mother’s side comes from the Rheinland, my father’s side comes from Saxony, near Leipzig, and incidentally where my father studied at the Gewandhaus and the Hochschule in Leipzig. And as I have I have an early claim to fame playing a very important performance here…a premiere in Carnegie Hall, my father has a similar claim. He played with Nikisch a Bruckner symphony when he was fourteen years old. ETZ: Good God. GS: Because the Gewandhaus Orchestra was of a certain size, and I guess Nikisch increased the size of the orchestra for a Bruckner symphony and when they did that they took the most talented students from the Gewandhaus, or from the Hochschule, and so my father got to play with Nikisch when he was fourteen years old. ETZ: Oh my. GS: So he must have been a pretty good violinist already then. So anyway - ETZ: Gunther, tell us your father’s full name and your mother’s full name. GS: Well, my father’s name was Arthur Edward Schuller. Edward was his father. And my mother, is…her maiden name was Elsie Bernartz, which is a family, really, that came from Alsace-Lorraine, used to be called, which is that part of Eastern France or Western Germany, whichever you want to call it, which traded countries, you know, like, I don’t know, a hundred times in the last thousand years. So, but they, that whole clan had moved up north towards Cologne, specifically Krefeld, which is where my mother grew up. But

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) she was an American, actually, by birthright because she was born in New Haven, only by accident, so to speak. Because her father, who was an…who had steel factories, I don’t know what particular…machinery, I think it was, that he built in the early part of the century. And he opened up a factory in the United States around 1900 or 1901, because, you know, the United States was the land of the unlimited… ETZ: Opportunity. GS: …opportunities, so everybody came here. And, but the factory was not successful, but during the three years that my grandfather was here, my mother was born. and so she always had a kind of dual citizenship. Anyway, she was born here, but grew up in, in Krefeld in Germany. And my grandfather also opened up a factory in Belgium just before World War I. And that was a bad move, because when Germany then invaded Belgium, the Beligians - he was a German national - they captured him and, and he was in jail, and none of us ever saw him again. He just disappeared. I mean, he was presumably a prison in Belgium or someplace for most of the war years, so in essence, my mother grew up without a father, really. And so that’s the prehistory, and incidentally, all of my… I think it goes back five generations more, that they were all musicians, my father’s father, my father’s grandfather, my father’s great-grandfather, in, in this…in Saxony. They were the music directors, the…in German they call them the Stadtpfeifer, which was really the town musicians, who not only played in the towers, you know, in the churches, in stuff like that, you read hear about that, but they, they provided all the music for dances and little classical concerts. So that my two sons, who are wonderful jazz musicians, are the sixth generation of musicians. ETZ: And we’ll be hearing them tomorrow night as part of our “Making Music” series. GS: That’s true, as a matter of fact, yes. ETZ: Gunther, just a little bit about what the schooling was like for a seven, eight, nine-year-old in Germany at that time.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

GS: Well, that was fantastic. I have often said that whatever I am, whatever talents I have and whatever, not talents, but whatever knowledge I’ve acquired, it is because I was fortunate enough to go to two extraordinary private schools, one in Germany, one here in the United States, St. Thomas Church Choir School on 53rd Street. ETZ: Right over here. GS: And…that school in Germany, I include that because…this’ll give you an idea, in the first grade we already had Latin and French. In the United States at that time, in first grade you were doing fingerpainting and drinking milk and cookies, you know. So, I remember, even in the second grade I remember specifically they were teaching us, in geography they were teaching us about the latest scientific discoveries, geographic discoveries of how the plates had moved and how continents had been…that was all new discovery. So I mean, this was a school that was very advanced and scholastically a very high level and I think we all know by now that whatever good training and teaching you absorb in your earliest years, you know, that’s the best. You can’t ask for anything better. ETZ: Yeah, you’re so open and available to everything. GS: Whereas we shove a lot of our education in the United States into the, into what we call higher education, college and university. And we do pretty miserably with grammar school, although we used to do better then, you know fifty – sixty years ago than we do now. But anyway, so I was very fortunate to go to that school. The only trouble was that eventually Hitler began to invade even these private schools, and, so we Americans, Chinese, Brazilians – there were kids from every nation – we all felt, you know, threatened and eventually my parents just brought me back to the United States. But it also was precipitated in 1936 by an accident where I lost my right eye and so, imagine, you know, I ended up in the hospital, I lost my eye, and my parents, of course, were three thousand miles away. And my mother came over, but in those days it took a whole week to get anywhere.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

ETZ: You were eleven. GS: Yeah, I was eleven, yeah. And…they…you know, the ships took about six – seven days to go from there to Bremerhaven and then she came. So then I was in the hospital for a week there, and then I came back here. And then I went to this other wonderful school, St. Thomas, which again was scholastically of such an extraordinary level. I wasn’t aware of this at the time, all I know is that when I left that school, ‘cause I had to leave the school because it’s a choir school, and… ETZ: Your voice changed. GS: I was intended to come back for a third or fourth year, I’ve forgotten now, fourth year, but my voice changed during the summer. Well, so actually there’s no diploma, there’s no picture of me graduating or anything, I have absolutely nothing that shows anything that I ever went to any school. And, so, I…when I then went for a little bit to a high school, when I was fourteen, I think, I found out I was like, something like three years ahead of everybody in the high school. This was Jamaica High School, not a particularly great school anyway. And…band so that this education, this…and the discipline that went with that…and the…and they evidently taught you to…the greatest kind of teaching, I think, is that which teaches you to teach yourself, you know. ‘Cause a school, no matter how great it is, cannot do everything for everybody. A lot of it you have to do on your own. And so, in that sense, I am very indebted to my parents for putting me through these two fabulous schools. And the choir school, of course, was involved with music, obviously. ETZ: When’d you start playing the horn? GS: Well, that was, that was during the time right after I left choir school or maybe it was even during my last year there. I first played the and that’s funny and that has to do with

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

Carnegie Hall, because as I mentioned earlier, my father took me to a lot of concerts, you know. And, and I was not particularly interested in music, I should mention this. ETZ: Yes, you should. GS: I didn’t think anything about music, becoming a professional least of all, until I was about eleven. ETZ: Did you think about anything else, like you’d like to be this or that? GS: Well I was very gifted with drawing, painting, and I spent most of my youth drawing, and particularly I know that I did a lot of nature drawings both in watercolors, or pastels, or including in paint. And most of that is lost. I have some things from that time. So I was sort of hoping to be an artist, which is my mother had wanted to be. She was also very gifted that way. She was also a very…she wasn’t a professional musician, but she had some of the keenest ears that I’ve ever encountered in anybody, in respect to music, and you know. And so I never thought about music and it wasn’t that there was any particular resistance to music or, you know, a rebellion against my father or anything like that. It just, I wasn’t interested in music until about eleven and…well anyway, the story about Carnegie Hall was I was at a concert. I remember sitting up in the dress circle, and of course, from there down to the stage is quite a distance. And at that time the New Philharmonic had a very famous flutist by the name of John Amans. He was Dutch and he had acquired a gold flute. It was…I believe it was said to be the first gold flute ever built, and he did that because in 1936, some years before that Georges Barrère had built…had a platinum flute built for which then Varèse wrote the famous piece Density 21.5, is it? Yeah. And so, with a little bit of envy and jealousy, Amans, who was first flutist of the Philharmonic decided he, well…that he was going to outdo this guy and get a gold flute. And this is all I remember. I remember sitting up there and the orchestra is playing, and when Amans moved as any musician does when they play, this gold flute glistened, you know, in the light of the stage. And I am reputed to have said to my father, “Oh, I love that instrument, the way it shines and everything. Can’t I play the flute?” Had nothing to do with music. [ETZ laughs] It was, you know, it was this shiny instrument. So he got me a flute and he

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) got me a teacher, who was the piccolo player in the, in the, in the New York Philharmonic at the time, Mortimer Rapfogel, and I don’t think he was – ETZ: Rapfogel, did you say? GS: Yeah, yeah. I don’t think he was a very good teacher, but anyway, I played the flute, sort of, not reluctantly, but, you know, casually and I ended up then in high school playing piccolo in, in…and flute in the band. ETZ: Stars and Stripes Forever was your thing. [laughs] GS: Probably, probably. And then, and yeah…so then I must have already been playing the horn, because I remember in high school I played in the symphony orchestra they had playing the horn in the afternoons and playing in the band in the morning rehearsals, and of course, every day I was ruining both embouchures. Every time I played the flute I ruined the horn embouchure and every time I played the horn it ruined the flute embouchure. So I got a little tired of the flute and the literature didn’t seem as exciting to me, I think I recall. And so I switched to the horn. And then, and then went to the Manhattan School of Music to study horn, and that’s the only teach…musical training I ever had. I’m self taught in every other respect, but of course you can’t probably teach yourself to play the horn, so I had a horn teacher, who was also a member of the New York Philharmonic, Robert Schulze. He was fourth horn player and in those days the New York Philharmonic horn section consisted of really a German family. The first horn player was Bruno Jaenicke, who was my idol. He was the most elegant, the most wonderful musician on the horn at that time, not the greatest virtuoso necessarily, but when he played you forgot all about horn. It was just great music making. And his…the Schulzes had married into the Jaenicke family and so there were these three Germans and there was one Italian in the middle of that, third horn player Luigi Felici, who was of a totally different style from these players. You know, German horn playing in those days was considered the highest exemplar of that, you know. ETZ:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

Sine qua non. GS: And Felici was quite a different player. So anyway, Robert Schulze was the…along with a man named Franzl, were the two major teachers in New York City at that time. And Schulze was at the Manhattan School and Franzl was at Juilliard. And Manhattan School was a settlement school at that time and it…I guess it was cheaper to…for my parents to send me there to take my lessons than Juilliard. I don’t know the details. ETZ: Juilliard was already Juilliard or was it still the Institute of Musical Art? GS: No, it…no, well…I’m not sure. I think it was just changing. ETZ: Maybe the predecessor, yeah. GS: And so I went to the Manhattan School of Music and studied horn there and that all began when I was fourteen, and…as the records show, by the time I was sixteen I was a professional horn player. So the point of that is that here I was totally uninterested in music, presumably, all my childhood and then once I decided to become a musician, the first thing I did was to compose, I started that at age eleven…I became a professional within two years of, of starting on the horn, which is pretty, pretty… ETZ: Remarkable. GS: Remarkable, I think. ETZ: Well, Gunther, lets talk a little bit about this sixteen-year-old sitting in the New York Philharmonic [coughs] excuse me…playing the…possibly the New York premiere of the

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

Shostakovich Seventh Symphony, which is the first record that we’ve come up with here at, at Carnegie. GS: Give her this. I have it right there, on the right hand side. ETZ: Now this is the concert conducted by Toscanini, of whom I have by the way, some wonderful pictures right here. And tell us what it was like to be a sixteen-year-old horn player… GS: Well, I… ETZ: …sitting there. GS: To answer that question I have to say that Toscanini, whose temper tantrums, of course, are legendary… ETZ: Here’s one, I think, preserved for all time. GS: Yeah, right. He, he frightened us all. I mean, there wasn’t a music who lived in terror of Toscanini’s rehearsals and so on. I, now…I knew all about that because one of my earliest memories of my father is, and this happened many, many times, him coming home from a rehearsal of the New York Philharmonic white as a ghost. And once again, Toscanini had, you know, broken the baton and thrown it into the orchestra, he had broken his watch, he had yelled and screamed in, in dirty Italian words at the orchestra. And during the Philharmonic days, that’s from 1930 to 1936, he was even worse than he was later on with the NBC Symphony. Now, mind you, of course he was a great conductor, and there’s no…but his podium behavior was simply outrageous. And in those days, of course, many conductors were like that, particularly the composers who imitated Toscanini who thought well that’s the way to be a great conductor, you know, to yell and scream at an

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) orchestra. And I played later with the NBC Symphony as extra horn and I remember other, you know, pretty horrible experiences with Toscanini in that, but so, when you asked me “What was it like?” I mean, I was scared stiff. I thought my career would be over before it even got started because if he nailed me or something, you know, at the tender age of sixteen I don’t know what would have happened. Now the point, however, is that in the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony, Shostakovich used eight horns. The reason I got to play that piece was because they’re extra horns. The Philharmonic had only four, or five with an assistant horn player and so they had to hire the extra four. And I’m sure it was through the influence of my teacher, Robert Schulze, who was fourth horn in the Philharmonic. He went to Zirato, or whoever the manager… ETZ: Bruno Zirato’s on the list, yeah. GS: Bruno Zirato, yeah. And said, “Look, I’ve got this talented young horn player. Why don’t you hire him? And he has a good high register.” So I ended up playing seventh horn. And, and as I say, I was just terrified because I have all these memories of my father being… you know, talking…about Toscanini and my father’s hand shaking, you know, like when they played one of the famous occasions was the Lohengrin overture, starts with four solo violins. Now my father was on the first desk of the second violins, so he was one of the four violins, and Toscanini tortured those four people, the concertmaster and three others, you know, for hours and hours about these few little notes that they had to play. And so all kinds of tales and horror stories circulated round in my young brain and I thought, “My god, I, you know, yeah, I want to do this, but am I going to survive this.” Well, I did survive it because as it turns out, as we all know, Toscanini was not particularly into new music and that was new music at the time. And for which he has been, you know, criticized often. He eventually did Ferde Grofé and Samuel Barber. He did a few pieces, you know, but mostly he was great in the standard repertory. [break in tape] GS: ...began to behave a little better, not completely. [to cameraman] Are you ready? Anyway, he was especially great in Wagner, I think more than in Beethoven, although his reputation rested on his Beethoven symphonies, and, of course, Rossini and Verdi. And then the other thing he did marvelously was Debussy. His performance of La Mer, pieces like

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) that, are extraordinary. He didn’t have a big reputation for French music. But anyway, because he was not so involved with new music, I have a funny feeling that he really did not know the Shostakovich symphony so intimately well as he knew everything else. And the piece was brand new, he had probably not studied it as long as he had cond…studied Otello, for example, or the Rossini Barber of Seville overture, whatever. And I…he never discovered me. In other words, he never said anything to me, so I came out of this whole experience… ETZ: Unscathed. GS: …unscathed. And so it’s a big plum in my, in my career. The thing is that…I…it opened a door for me, I suppose, and we have to, you know…in, musical circles, in, in New York, and we also have to add the fact that it was during the war, so quite a few horn players had already been drafted, you know, because we entered the war in ’41 and so that… ETZ: I noticed on the program it says “Remember Pearl Harbor” in two or three different places. GS: Yeah, right, yeah. So that I think some of these jobs I got, I got possibly because some horn player who had that job was now in the Army or the Navy or whatever, so I was fortunate in that way, too. ETZ: Just being a little too young to go in the service. GS: Yeah, at that time, yeah I was sixteen. And, and of course, the other thing one should say about that Shostakovich Seventh premier is that Shostak-, I mean, Koussevitzky and Stokowski and Toscanini fought over the rights to get this premier. It was during the war; we were allies with the Russians, I mean, this was for Russian relief, and these were the, you know, fantastic times where we all started to try to learn Russian, by the way, you know. How things changed after that. But…and, and I…and we all believed that Toscanini

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) did get the premier – actually Koussevitzky or Stokowski should have gotten it because they were doing new music all the time, you know, and Stokowski had already recorded the Fifth Symphony, you know. But Toscanini got it because the whole NBC RCA Victor complex went to work on this, financially, in other words they sort of bribed their way into getting the performance for Toscanini and that’s how he ended up with it, you know. And I’m not sure whether, at this point, but we can research this, whether the performance with the New York Philharmonic in October was actually the performance I played because, as I recall, there were two performances, both sort of called premiers and I think one of them was for this Russian relief, you know, because Leningrad was the city that the Germans had surrounded for almost a year and we all sent money and relief to Russians during that time. So this concert was dedicated to that, and I believe that concert was with the New York Philharmonic, but…or the NBC Symphony, I just am not sure. And I…all I know is that he did it twice, and probably both times in Carnegie Hall because that was the main venue to do these things. And… ETZ: When I was in Leningrad in 1988, I had written a piece for the New York Philharmonic that was premiered there. Even in 1988, there were older men walking around the city with medals and things on their chest, I mean, it’s almost impossible to realize the horror that they went through in Leningrad at that time. GS: Certainly, and including, by the way, then, of course, the Germans because they finally… they could not capture Leningrad and thousands, tens of thousands of Germans died in the cold there. They had never experienced cold weather like that. In the midst of all this, Shostakovich wrote this remarkable symphony, which I love, by the way, very much. ETZ: I do, too. GS: There are many people who, who put it down…that famous march that he wrote in the first movement. It’s very captivating. I’ve conducted the symphony several times, myself, because I, well I have this relationship to it and I think it’s quite a wonderful piece. Anyway, Toscanini ended up with the premier, but…now before that, possibly before that I have another association with Carnegie Hall, in that, I believe, in that same year, I played in

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) the first performance of the Ives First Symphony and there was a little, little, symphony… sinfonietta, it was called and I can’t at this moment recall who the conductor was, but evidently what happened was the regular horn player for this sinfonietta that played in, in the little, what was called the little recital hall, which is now called Weill Hall. I remember definitely playing on that stage, when…and the Ives First Symphony was being played, if not for the first time, the second time. So that’s another possible – ETZ: Was Ives there? GS: No, no, no. Because we all know, Ives never left Danbury. He wasn’t even at the famous Leonard Bernstein performance in 1953, but he did hear it on the radio. In those days the Philharmonic was on the radio every Sunday afternoon, so he heard that. No, he didn’t, he didn’t…he was too much of an invalid to, to come to New York for any concert. And no one was playing his music, anyway. This performance of the Ives First Symphony, I’m sure, was incredibly exceptional, because nobody was doing his music. They all thought he was crazy and that the music basically unperformable, although the First Symphony is sort of lukewarm Brahms, not the best Brahms even. And so that…but some of his more complex and difficult works, like the Fourth Symphony and a lot of his chamber music was just…was not being played at all, so, no, Ives wasn’t there. I think maybe the conductor was Seidenberg, who was a…what was he, a cellist? And who was a sometime conductor. ETZ: Anton, was it? GS: Yeah, I can’t even think of his first name. There was a whole family of Seidenbergs who were musicians. Quite, quite famous in that they were…they often worked with the Budapest Quartet as extra, you know, cellist or violist or whatever. ETZ: What was musical life like in general in New York in the, in the ‘40s, since you were pretty well involved in it. We notice when you look at these old programs, advertisements for music for sale, and, you know, I’m sure people were going out and buying this music to play at home, more of less amateur musicians. Was musical life very…

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

GS: Oh, it was incredible. I don’t think there was any city on the face of this earth, except perhaps, I don’t know, Paris in those days, or…well, of course, we’re speaking during the war if we’re talking about ’42, ’43, but no, musical life here was simply incredible in terms of the variety of things that were offered. I mean, Carnegie Hall was going day and night. Every great musician…in those days, Carnegie Hall was the center of musical activities in New York. There was also Town Hall on 43rd Street, but Carnegie Hall was the premier venue. There was no , there was, you know… ETZ: It still is. GS: …so anything that, that - What? ETZ: It still is the premier. GS: Yeah, of course. ETZ: Although there are others. GS: But, so that anything that, anybody who was of any consequence or had any ambitions to make it in the musical world, really had to appear in Carnegie Hall, because it was unique and it was this famous hall built by Carnegie and it had the…Tchaikovsky conducted the first concert here and Dvo#ák wrote his symphony for here and Anton Seidl conducted that in Carnegie Hall. All this legendary stuff right through the teens and twenties of, of this century. So Carnegie Hall was the place and…but, but not only that, as I mentioned, you have Town Hall, which was in those days as active as Carnegie Hall and besides that you had a, at that time, pretty wonderful radio station WQXR, which played all day and it was the first FM station in, in New York.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

ETZ: Well also, the radio stations in those days had orchestras, like the NBC Symphony was… GS: And the Columbia Symphony. ETZ: Columbia Broadcasting, ABC… GS: They all did, yes. ETZ: There was a WOR String Quartet that Harvey Shapiro was in. GS: Right, yeah, I did a lot of work, once I became a professional horn player here, I did a lot of work with some of those orchestras. I played the Telephone Hour, I played the, what was it, Firestone Hour…a lot of those things. Yeah, no, I mean, one cannot imagine anymore…I mean New York is very busy musically even today, of course, but there was a singularity about the activities here. Now it’s more widespread in the sense that everywhere in the United States there are…I mean I live in Boston – I can’t keep up with the musical life of Boston, either. So there’s been a tremendous proliferation of musical activities, which in those days in the ‘40s was more uniquely centered in New York and particularly in Carnegie Hall. ETZ: Did you feel any kind of hope about being a young composer at that time? GS: Well, as I mentioned, I…the first thing I did in music seriously was to compose. And, of course, like all of us, I composed some ridiculous little baby pieces, you know. The way, the way, actually, it’s interesting how I…you know, Ellen, that you probably don’t know exactly how you go into music or why and the circumstances. Even at my somewhat advanced age of eleven, I don’t remember anything. I don’t know…all I know is that

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

I suddenly discovered I had musical gifts, or my parents discovered it. And that was sort of at age eleven or…yeah, when I went into the choir school, I…it developed. I had a beautiful soprano voice. And at St. Thomas, by the way, I began to sing some of the famous soprano solos in the Haydn Creation and the Brahms Requiem and things like that. And, again, speaking of Carnegie Hall, I remember one of my greatest early experiences in music was singing the soprano part in the first movement of the St. Matthew Passion. St. Thomas choir, we were forty boys in the choir, we were hired by the New York Philharmonic to sing that, that part and, and Bruno Walter was the conductor. And here I’m, you know whatever, I am twelve or thirteen years old, I’m singing this great masterpiece, which I had not heard before at that time, in Carnegie Hall with my father sitting in the front of the stage with the New York Philharmonic. It was just unbelievable. So… ETZ: Did you work with… GS: So where was I? ETZ: Well, I was trying to get a feeling for what it was like as a teenager, whether you felt you could be a composer… GS: Well, as I say, I…the beginning of me as a composer is so ridiculous and pitiful that I must tell it. My brother had gotten a toy xylophone for Christmas, my younger brother, Edgar. Now my father was a violinist and a pianist, my mother played the piano rather well, although not professionally, I was already playing the flute at this time, I mean, just very beginner flutist, and my brother had this little toy xylophone. So after Christmas, I somehow, and again, I have no idea how this happened, why it happened, what moved me to do this, I decided to compose a little piece. I had never thought about composing. I knew already…I had absorbed an awful lot of music, you know, that I knew almost by heart, but I had never thought about composing. So I wrote a little piece for the four instruments: violin, piano, flute, and xylophone. I still have little scraps of this, and it’s, you know, big round baby, baby notes and you know, ridiculous music. But that was the first thing, and I liked that experience internally so much that, that “Gee, this is something I’d

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) like to do.” And from that little kernel, you know, I developed, I developed as a composer. So during the years at, at St. Thomas, I studied not composition, but theory… ETZ: Probably counterpoint? GS: …with, with Dr. T. Tertius Noble. Yes, counterpoint. All basic musical theories. And I still have my exercises, my harmony in chorale and counterpoint exercises with marginal notes from him. And he was you know, the founder of the school. He came from an old English school, choir school tradition, a very strict teacher and I remember he rapped my knuckles many, many times when I wrote parallel fifths and stuff like that, you know. So, well, what was it like? I’ve got to say this…I…my first real successful performance of anything I’d written was some years later when I in Cincinnati as principal horn and Eugene Goossens, great conductor and, you know, someone whom I revere very much, premiered …gave me a premier of my first horn concerto. That was in 1945, that’s a little bit later. And… ETZ: When did you go to Cincinnati? GS: And I made my debut as a horn soloist and a composer in 1945. I’d been composing hundreds of pieces. I had more unfinished symphonies [laughs] than anybody…certainly than Schubert. And, and then I ran into a whole enclave of Schoenbergians that were in New York at the time, including , a great… ETZ: You’re talking about the ‘40s now? GS: Yes, this was in ’46, so I’m just jumping ahead a little bit to answer your question. And because I was viewed to be a Schoenbergian, or…and later a twelve tone composer, which I still am, by the way, I was ostracized. And any of us in that circle were sort of ostracized as composers because, frankly speaking, the entire musical scene was totally governed and controlled by the neo-classic tradition or axis, which…the leaders of which were and Igor Stravinsky. So my early years as a composer were very,

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) very difficult ones and, you know, I had no…I just composed because I loved to compose, I felt I had to, this was my major talent, but I certainly had no easy successes. And it wasn’t until many years later that I, you know…actually that all then happened through Dimitri Mitropoulos, who gave us the first performance of Schoenberg and Webern and Berg in New York, and when he performed some of my music, that sort of put me on the national map, but that wasn’t until 1956. ETZ: ’56, yeah. GS: So in all those earlier years, I had no chance to hear my music, you know, with this great exception. ETZ: Except for toy xylophone. [laughs] GS: The toy xylophone and the…and my first horn concerto with, with Goossens. ETZ: Back up just a moment, because right after your success as a teenage horn player in New York, you were hired as first horn in Cincinnati. Right? You were quite young. GS: Well, even before that, I began to…playing, began playing mostly as first horn, in a lot of sort of different organizations and concerts. The number concerts, which in the summer took place in, in Central Park. I was the horn player for at least three different little opera companies, one of which still exists, The Amato Opera Company. What they used to do, they used to play, you know, Cavalleria rusticana or Pagliacci or Carmen with a little scratch orchestra of maybe eleven musicians. And they, for some reason, they always had a horn. And there were three of these. And I think one of them was down on Canal Street, another one was…there were…the other two, they were up on the west side, they were almost…they were opera companies that existed in an apartment, you know, with a large living room. Anyway, so I got to play opera music. I knew most of the basic operas, you know, by the time I was sixteen. I had played all them. So I was working around with all

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) these different orchestras because evidently I guess I must have had quite a reputation already as a remarkably talented, basically very lyric, musical player. And then, word got around about a job opening at the Ballet Theatre, of which Antal Dorati was the music director at the time. And the reason I left high school when I was sixteen was for that. I wasn’t learning anything, as I say, I was years ahead. I was composing during French class and mathematics class and I was still getting B+ grades. I think, “I’m wasting my time.” And I got this job offer to play second horn in the Ballet Theatre touring orchestra. This was before I went to Cincinnati. ETZ: And this was with Dorati? GS: Dorati, yes. ETZ: With whom you later had quite a nice relationship. Lots of performances. GS: Yeah, oh yeah, many things with Dorati. And the great thing about that was, not only was the repertory of the Ballet Theatre fantastic, everything from the great Tchaikovsky ballets, Petrushka, and Pillar of Fire, which was Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, which, of course, I didn’t play as a horn player, being a string piece. But anyway, this great literature and here I’m sixteen years old . . . we did a three months tour, from January to March, or something like that, and we traveled all over the United States. So here I am sixteen - ETZ: That would have been by train. GS: Yeah, mostly by train, oh yeah, yeah. Here I’m sixteen years old and I’m seeing the country. I mean, we literally went…if you circled the whole country up to the northwest, Vancouver, you know, Seattle, all those cities, down the California coast, across to New Orleans and Atlanta, and back up the east coast. I started out in St. Louis, that was my first night, in January, in January 1943. So here I had this fantastic job playing all this great

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) music, and I was making 125 dollars a week, which was, in those days a huge amount of money. ETZ: A lot of money in those days. GS: Now you had to pay your own expenses out of that, however, a very decent hotel room cost two dollars. If you really wanted to splurge, you would pay five dollars, you know, or…and a, and a meal, I mean seventy-five cents, that was it, great meal, you know. So you could save a lot of money that way of the 125 dollar salary. And the other great thing was we had a twenty-five piece orchestra, but in the big cities that was augmented by the local symphony orchestra, for example in, you know, Los Angeles, the filled out the rest of the orchestra, but in the little towns we played with this twenty-five piece orchestra. And because I was so much into music and composing and I knew all the pieces we played intimately, I ended up playing as second horn, second parts, tuba parts, you know, all kind of, all kinds of parts that I simply either knew or that had been penciled into our parts, you know. We just tried all of us to play as many notes of these great masterpieces…because you can’t do much justice to Petrushka with a twenty-five piece orchestra. So this was this fantastic opportunity and, of course, the most wonderful thing for me…I was already, and still am, a Delius freak and Thomas, Sir Thomas Beecham had made multivolume recordings in 1928 of Delius’s music, which I love for its harmonic richness and, and also because every Delius piece is like a horn concerto, so, you know, I was in heaven hearing this music. And, and at that time the great choreographer Antony Tudor, had made a superb ballet, Romeo and Juliet, of, I don’t know six/seven different Delius pieces. And here I was, you know, every night hearing or playing this great music of Delius, so for me it was an incredible, informative, and educational musical experience. And then, I got fired by Dorati because my colleague . . . there were only two horns. I was second horn, first horn, Arthur Holmes, a wonderful horn player, but a man who had probably two thousand jokes, most of them dirty. And I came from a very innocent home life where…never…a dirty joke simply didn’t exist. My father had none, didn’t have any memory for such things. And so here I was this virgin, and this guy bombarded me with all these jokes. And I got caught. And he would, you know, when we had thirteen bars of rest or twenty-five bars, he would start on a joke. “I got the latest one,” you know, whispering. And he would start and he would get to the punch line like about three bars before my next entrance and I’m doubled up with laughter and I’m either

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) missing my cue or just barely making it. I mean, I knew the cue was coming, it wasn’t a musical thing, but I, you know, I…you can’t play when you’re laughing, you can’t play the horn. So this happened too often and finally Dorati called me in near the end of the tour and he said, “Look Gunther, you are a most talented music, but I’m gonna have to fire you, because you don’t know how to behave in an orchestra and you know, you’ve got to learn to be a professional in that sense.” And maybe it was the best thing that ever happened to me because I learned a lesson from that, but I blame Arthur Holmes for all this because, you know… ETZ: Rightly so. GS: …I was well behaved and I was so involved with the music that certainly I would have come in except for all these distractions. So he fired me – ETZ: They needed a second horn player that knew all the jokes, that’s the trouble. [laughs] GS: Well, maybe, yeah. And in many other ways it was a great education, after all the Ballet Theatre in those days was an incredible company, with all these great…André Eglevsky and Baronova…I can’t remember all their names…and those young guys, who then all ended up in Bernstein’s Fancy Free, Jerome Robbins included, and what was his name? Kidd…K-I-D-D. Anyway, wonderfully talented people, all these dancers. And, and in the orchestra there were also some fantastic musicians who amongst other things got me to read Proust and Tolstoy. And, you know, it was like a philosophical educational opening for me to hang out with these already quite seasoned musicians. And so then when I got fired I ended up playing back in New York, with all these opera companies and some concerts and whatnot, and during the summer I took three auditions. There were three openings, one in the Pittsburgh Symphony, which was for third horn, the Philadelphia had an opening for assistant horn, and the Cincinnati Symphony had an opening for first horn. So I auditioned for Ormandy, for Reiner, who was another person one feared, you know, he was, next to Toscanini, the great temper tantrum giver, and then Eugene Goossens. And I took these auditions, I think some of them were here in Carnegie Hall, you know, down in…or maybe in the Wellington Hotel, which is next door, you know. Anyway, and

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

I won all three auditions, that is to say the conductors all said, “We want you.” And, of course, guess what I picked? I picked first horn with Cincinnati and by that time, at that time already knew about the Cincinnati Symphony because Goossens had made some wonderful recordings already, particularly of the Walton Violin Concerto, which I loved dearly, then already and many other things. And so, I came to an orchestra where the conductor was not only a wonderful conductor, but also a quite distinguished composer, unfortunately his music has been somewhat neglected in recent years, but anyway, so, and he sort of became a kind of a mentor to me during the two years that I played horn. He took great interest in me as a composer. So I had all these great fortunes, you know, with this Ballet Theatre experience, then the Cincinnati Symphony, where, by the way, of course, amongst other things, I really got involved with jazz because I had been listening to jazz here in New York when I was in high school, and, and, but in Cincinnati – ETZ: And in those days there was a very, very active jazz club scene. 52nd Street was it? GS: Well sure, but Broadway was…but that’s a little bit later when I was able to enjoy all of that, when I was at the as, as solo horn. But even in Cincinnati… Cincinnati had a black section, of course, in which there were, must have been a dozen clubs where the big bands of that time, I mean the black orchestras - Jimmy Lunsford, Count Basie, - all those bands played there. And there was also a lot of great jazz being played in some of the lounges in the hotels and in some of the theaters because everything occurred in the theaters in those days. In those days the bands played between film showings, you know. They played a kind of a jazz stage show, so bands would play like five times a day. They would start with a band, and then a film, and then the orchestra again, and so on. So there was a lot of activity, but I and my, my German… the Cincinnati Symphony was a primarily German orchestra, even in those days, you know, and most of those musicians, they were elderly, they of course thought my behavior was outrageous going to these… ETZ: jazz GS:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

…black section of town, and jazz…“What are you having to do with this degenerate music,” you know. “You’re a great musician, why do you bother with this?” So, nonetheless, I spent…I mean, I didn’t sleep much in Cincinnati. I was up most nights, you know, listening to some jazz group or orchestra. And that’s where I first met Duke Ellington in 1943 and we became very close friends through, you know, his life. And I met everybody then, you know, famous…now famous jazz musicians, who were then also in their late teens or early twenties, as I was. I was seventeen when I came to Cincinnati and I met all those musicians and, you know, they became life, lifelong friends. And I began to sit in with one particular group, so actually beyond just listening to jazz and loving it, and by the way, I started transcribing Duke Ellington’s music from the recordings and when I was seventeen years old already, because I wanted to see what this music looked like in score form. And – ETZ: Gunther were you playing horn? GS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was a…where the Westin Hotel was in Cincinnati, there was an alley. In that alley there were three jazz clubs, and one of them was populated by a wonderful trio who played superb imitations of the Nat King Cole Trio, which was famous at that time. That was before Nat King Cole started singing, before his famous singing career, that was a little later. And he had already made all these great recordings, Straighten Out and Fly Right and Sweet Lorraine and all kinds of things, and I was already a record collector. I was buying all these great recordings of jazz, spending all my money that I made with the Cincinnati Symphony on recordings, classical and jazz. And after I’d hung out with these musicians, you know, night after night, one of them said, “Why don’t you come and bring your horn, sit in with us.” So I began to play, not very well I’m sure, but things like simple blues and so on and we had, you know, a trio of guitar, piano and bass with . And so I got my feet wet with that kind of jazz experience. So that was really my total opening up to jazz, as a music that I considered right away, even before I went to Cincinnati, to be qualitatively equivalent with any other kind of music. It was just a different... [ break in tape] ETZ:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

ballet company…reminded me of, there’s some insights in this, in your quite recent book on conducting about the difference between the musician who’s a pianist, who comes at the score from the piano and a musician who’s…like Toscanini for instance…or yourself. GS: Well, you know, he was a cellist. ETZ: Well I mean, or a musician like yourself or Toscanini that came out of the orchestra. GS: Oh I see, yeah. ETZ: Where you had that kind of a hands-on orchestral experience and it’s a very interesting observation. GS: Well I don’t make any claims in my book, The Compleat Conductor, either way. I mean, great musicians, great conductors can develop from any kind of a background or source. But I must say, at least for myself, that again, in addition to my fabulous schooling that I had, which gave me a very disciplined mind and, and a sense of logic and respect for form and all kinds of things that are very important to composing. Everything that I am as a composer, particularly in regard to my orchestral works, I learned sitting in the orchestra. I mean, here I am playing all this great literature, up to the early works of Stravinsky, which we were playing regularly at that time, and being immersed in this music in a physical way. I mean, it’s one thing to hear it from a distance on a stage or it’s another thing to hear it on a recording. I was an avid record collector. I started collecting records when I was thirteen years old. I still have my entire 78 collection, by the way. And, so I was, I was involved very much as a listener and a studier in all of that music I’d bought, hundreds of scores at Patelsons, by the way, you know that was already in existence at that time. But nothing could top the experience of sitting in the orchestra and actually feeling the, the physical vibrations of the music as it sort of rolled across the floor, as it were, you know. And sitting in such proximity… ETZ:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

Yeah, coming up through your feet and all… GS: Yeah. And sitting in proximity, you know, two feet away from the viola section or five feet away from the woodwind section and making the music night after night in this kind of physiological experience. Well you can’t top that. ETZ: I feel the same way, you know, that’s kind of the way I came up. And those seven years I spent here, with among other guest conductors, you, with the American Symphony. That’s…it just gets into your blood in a different way. And, and I have a feeling…in your book you delineated seven different kinds of ear, which is very, very, very interesting because so often when people say somebody’s got a good ear they mean they can hear a pitch that’s out of… GS: Yeah. ETZ: You know, that’s wrong or…but to delineate to the whole concept of line as being one of the forms of ear, seems to me it comes out of your experience in the orchestra where you start with sort of a messy, amorphous product and then you’re kind of molding it and shaping it and you’re having to think about all of these things, not necessarily at once at the beginning, you know, not until the end necessarily. GS: But can you – ETZ: To isolate this factor and that factor and to get a feeling for how music is actually brought to life, you know, that that’s a… GS: Yeah, no, absolutely. I can remember my first year at the Met… ETZ:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

Which was…? GS: That was in 1945. ETZ: ’45, okay. GS: ’45-’46, playing…the first time…in these little opera companies, we had not played Otello. That was a little too much for them, so this was the first time… ETZ: They probably had one bass. GS: And I didn’t know much about Otello, but I knew there was this famous bass passage, by the way, and some of the arias. But the first time I. . . that opening, which depicts this incredible storm happening in Venice and Otello’s coming back from a successful campaign, and there is not only this incredible orchestral prologue to the entire opera, but I discovered to my amazement that there’s an organ part in there, which plays a cluster. I think it’s B-flat, A, G-sharp in the bass register, so that’s…there’s this constant thunderous hum that goes on through this music. Well, I mean, I, you know, as a young composer discovering all the new techniques, you know, of twelve-tone and Stravinsky and Bartók and all of this great music that was going on, Messiaen already and so on, to hear this masterpiece of Otello that first time, I mean, I was totally shaken physically by this experience. And so experiences like that which are multiplied by, I don’t know, a factor of a hundred or five hundred or a thousand, whatever, they gave me a sense of, of what, of what happens inside an orchestra and what all the instruments can do or can’t do. And then, since I was already a composer, I didn’t sit there just as a horn player, sort of casually playing this music, I was studying the music live every split second that I was sitting in that, in those orchestras, whether it was the Met or Philharmonic or whatever it was. So that is a firsthand experience which, I won’t say it’s better, necessarily better than a secondhand experience of learning this in a school or from a teacher or whatever, but it is a unique experience in that sense. And I think a lot of my know-how getting around the orchestra and the things that I observed about conducting with a lot

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) of famous conductors . . . I played with every conductor you can, you can name, whether it’s Toscanini or Bruno Walter or Szell or Reiner or Fritz Busch. My first Mozart conductor was Fritz Busch at the Met, you know, that’s incredible. He was already famous for his Glyndenbourne recordings. So those are experiences which I feel incredibly privileged to have, to have gone through and which, I think, were central to making me at a very early stage a very precocious, a very, you know, young talented musician, happening to concentrate in composition. But I learned so much from all those pieces, just to play the Mendelssohn “Scotch” Symphony or the, or the “Italian” Symphony and, and sitting there and listening and I suppose analyzing what’s going on, you know, in a compositional way, in a theoretical way, not just grooving on my horn parts, you know. I mean, I…that’s irreplaceable. ETZ: It’s funny how we store these memories. I have so many little ones myself, I mean like Bruckner with Eugen Jochum, and, you know, where you get not just the notes of the piece, but you get a culture of the piece, you know. To have Mozart with Busch, you know, it’s really incredible. Gunther, you were at the Met until 1959, right? GS: Let me just say one more thing, because it connect up also with Carnegie Hall. I began to play, again through the influence of my teacher, with the New York Philharmonic as either extra horn or sometimes substituting for one of the players, you know, if the third horn was sick or something or, I sometimes played. And that went on for quite a few years, including a whole series or concerts that Carnegie Hall had in the summers, when most orchestras, of course, were on vacation. I mean, orchestras, except for the Boston Symphony, didn’t have fifty-two week seasons, you know they’re twenty-eight, and so in the summer, most musicians were unemployed. And that’s where I ended up, by the way, playing Broadway shows and things like that and then playing with the Goldman Band in the parks in Brooklyn. But anyway, during, during part of that period Carnegie Hall put on a series of concerts, where I remember William Steinberg conducting, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Golschmann, quite a few distinguished conductors, and so I became involved with the New York Philharmonic at a very early stage, not only as a listener, as I explained already, but also as a player, as extra horn. And I played two seasons, I believe, or most of two seasons at the Lewisohn Stadium, and part of that as first horn because that was a period where they…Jaenicke had retired and they were looking for a replacement for a, you know, a replacement for him and during that interim period I played an awful lot, even

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) as first horn. And here I was only nineteen years old or something like that. So again, I was absorbing all this music. I remember the repertory that Golschmann and Mitropoulos and Steinberg did was not just, you know, the Pastoral Symphony again and again, but all kinds of literature that I never had heard and much of it had never been recorded in those days. So again, I’m, I was not just a horn player, I was a composer and, reveling in learning all this material firsthand, you know, with the Met and the New York Philharmonic with…and then playing jazz and playing Broadway shows, you know. You can see what a complete education that was, you know. And in those days, Broadway was Broadway, I mean, you had all…I played Annie Get Your Gun with Ethel Merman for two seasons. Song of Norway, which was a wonderful experience because we played the Grieg every night and in that there are some fabulous horn solos, you know. So, I mean, all of this combined into a sort of very, very rich experience. ETZ: Well, you were at the Met for… GS: Fifteen years. ETZ: Fifteen years. Somebody at the Met told me, somebody in the orchestra said that Gunther Schuller left here the night that he got up and he was walking out of the house and he couldn’t remember which opera they had just done or something like that, and he said, “I’ll never do this again.” GS: Say this again. ETZ: That doesn’t ring a bell? [Laughs] GS: Say that again. ETZ:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

One of the players that was there for many, many years told me that, that you left the Met the night that you, by the time you got home you couldn’t remember which opera had been done. GS: No. ETZ: No, it doesn’t sound right. GS: No, that…I mean, that can’t be. That’s impossible. No, I…and I don’t even know what the intent of that story is. I mean, musicians sometimes tell these sort of slightly cynical stories, you know, musicians who long ago lost any interest in the music, you know, probably couldn’t even remember what piece they’ve just played. No, they’re…that wasn’t me at all. ETZ: I wouldn’t have thought that. GS: No, in fact I cried bitter tears when I gave up the horn three years later. I was very… Hold on. I was very divided about leaving the Met and so was the management. I mean, Leinsdorf did everything to keep me there, pay me more money and all kinds of perks and things. He was at that time sort of the titular musical director in 1959. I didn’t want to leave and I loved opera, but I became so well known as a composer and was getting so many commissions by that time, the late ‘50s, that I literally killing myself physically trying to be a horn player by day, and by the way playing lots of recording dates of jazz and pop music and all kinds of stuff, and trying to be a composer. And it all sort of came to a crashing halt when, when I fainted for the second time in my…as it happened, in the shower. And the second time was really serious. I think I was out for about two or three minutes and lying in this, in this shower, which by the way had eight faucets and I was about to drown because my body was lying on the drain, so the water couldn’t run out and it had a very high sill, or something, whatever you want to call it. So this water was piling up and all I remember is my, my youngest son at the time, he was three years old or something…no, my oldest son, I remember him looking down at me, I’m looking up and he said, “Hey, Daddy, what

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) are you doing down there?” you know. I had collapsed from overwork. And because I was literally composing all night, something like that, and I was playing the horn all day. And I was very conscientious, horn player, proud of my abilities and my talent and very high standards. And when I got to the point where for let’s say three days, I had no chance to play the horn and you can’t do that. ETZ: No, no. GS: I mean, you can’t do that on any instrument, but particularly with the lips, the embouchure of a horn player. I decided this isn’t working anymore. I have too much pride in my playing that I don’t want to do that. And so I reluctantly decided to give up, give up the horn and also to, same kind of thing, giving up the Met. Because the Met in those days, unlike today where many musicians have many days off and, you know, it’s a much better contract in terms of the number of hours you work and so on. In those days we worked all the time, even as principal horn. We had two principal horns, but nonetheless between the two of us and a little bit of extra stage horn business one had to do all the time, it was really a heavy full time job. And I was, I was already so deeply involved in composition. I was a stubborn old German. I was not gonna let either one of these things be diminished in my activities, but eventually it came to that point where something had to give and that’s where I left. And incidentally, as I say, Max Rudolf and Leinsdorf and various other conductors, Mitropoulos, they were all saying, “You can’t leave us. You know you’re the best, you’re almost the best musician in the Met. You’re the finest horn player we have, blah blah blah. You can’t leave us.” I said, “Look, I’ve got to do this. I’m a composer, I’ve got to leave.” And the irony of all that is, guess who left the Met one year after I did? ETZ: Leinsdorf. GS: Erich Leinsdorf, who became music director at Boston Symphony, where he then hired me to replace Aaron Copland in the, in at the, at the summer school. But that…we’re getting ahead of the story. ETZ:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

Well there’s an interesting overlap that certainly backs up what you were saying about your dual career practically killing you because we have a New York Philharmonic performance of your Brass Symphony with Mitropoulos in ’56 and Dramatic Overture in ’57 and Symbiosis in ’58 and, I mean, just on and on. So while you were still at the Met, before 1959 you were obviously doing quite a… GS: Well… ETZ: …making quite a name as a composer already. GS: Well, as I mentioned – ETZ: The Brass Symphony was probably the first kind of really big, big success, wasn’t it? GS: Yeah it was. As I mentioned already, Mitropoulos really put me on the map by doing my music in 1956 and 1957. I was, up until that point, a totally unknown composer. And when you got performed by the New York Philharmonic, with all of the national broadcasting that took place, that sort of was it. I mean, that was your big debut as a composer. So in that sense, I owe that to Mitropoulos. ETZ: Here’s a… GS: It’s interesting that… ETZ: Here’s a program from November 1 and 2, 1956. GS: Casadesus was on there…yeah, yeah.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

ETZ: Haydn symphony… GS: Yeah, and that, that was very courageous of Mitropoulos because A) I was an unknown composer and also I was a twelve-tone composer and that was still highly controversial. Although, by 1955 Webern had been rediscovered so things were changing in New York. Yeah, that’s Dimitri. ETZ: Here’s a picture of Mitropoulos. GS: Well…and by the way, we became very close friends during the years at the Met and then he…and we had many fantastic dinners together at La Scala, which was his second home and where he was treated like royalty and so I was, too, because I came with Mitropoulos. And also on tour, we had many wonderful experiences together. And he was the one, apart from my music, he introduced New York to all of the music of the twelve- tone or Second Viennese School that had never been played or had rarely been or hadn’t been played since Stokowski did, let’s say Wozzeck in 1931 or something. So for many of us young composers, this was heaven on earth to hear all this music live, you know. It certainly didn’t exist on recordings, you know. Eventually it did. And so I owe a great deal to Dimitri and he then at the end of his career with the Philharmonic commissioned…had the Philharmonic commission work with me, which is a piece called Spectra, which he then premiered with the New York Philharmonic in 1959 or 1960, around the same time that I was leaving… ETZ: 1960. GS: Yeah, I was…I had already left the Met at that time. ETZ:

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

But it’s interesting you mention about the twelve-tone composers because Mitropoulos’ name has come up in virtually every one of these I’ve done so far, from David Diamond to to…He must have been the most remarkable man. I… GS: He was. I mean, first of all, he’s the only saint that I’ve ever met - a living saint. As we all know, he was very generous, he gave all his money away, he was a, you know, he believed in the philosophies of St. Francis of Assisi and so wealth meant nothing to him. And he was also generous as a conductor in performing all kinds of music of whatever stylistic persuasion, even sometimes not so very good music because somehow he got involved with a composer and had promised him to do a piece and eventually he was true to his promise and kept that. Now because he did so much contemporary music he also suffered from that because eventually, the way it sort of finally came down, New York or the New York Philharmonic said, “This is too much contemporary music,” and, you know, the rest is history. And, you know, Mitropoulos left, Bernstein came in, and so on. But, I mean, he did fantastic things like the first performance of Milhaud’s Choéphores or the remarkable Respighi instrumentation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, all kinds of music. And I mean, I emphasize the word kinds, you know, styles of music that none of us had ever heard before. And of course he conducted all this music from memory. And, by the way, on that, since I was very close to him and visited him often in the Great Northern Hotel on 57th Street that doesn’t exist anymore, he had a little tiny penthouse situation up there. I visited with him very, very often and it is not true that he had a photographic memory. What he had was this unbelievable discipline of studying his music hours and hours and hours. He got up every morning at 4 o’clock and spent at least three or four hours before his Philharmonic rehearsals to study the music that he was working on, you know. So this was not some easy…this was a torture for him. ETZ: It’s interesting, in, in your book on conducting, which I’m, I’m reading at the moment, so that’s why I’m talking about it, you bring up this whole subject of discipline and what it takes to do these things and I think a lot of the, certainly the average public, has the notion that, you know, like a photographic memory is something that you have, you know, talent is something you have or…and they don’t understand that when somebody knows a score inside-out it means they really do underst…they’ve really worked very hard getting at the… what’s behind the notes, you know, and it’s very interesting to me.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

GS: Well, as I…the way I emphasize it is to retrace the steps of composition that the composer made in creating this piece and to know not just what is in the score… ETZ: but why… GS: …but why is it there? And in a sense, therefore, although that’s physically impossible, to know why every note in the Eroica is there, you know. That to me is the highest ideal of conducting and Mitropoulos didn’t always succeed in that, but he sure…that was his goal, that was his ideal. And in the hectic life that he led, particularly when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic having to do new programs every week, you know, practically every week. This was an enormous task and because he, in a sense, tortured himself by always wanting to do unknown composers or music that hadn’t been played in New York or whatever, he was constantly studying and, and learning. And, and sort of the only fun he ever had was…you know, he was famous for loving grade B movies. And so he spent a lot of time in Times Square going to these ridiculous movies and having these fantastic meals. Although here again, I mean, he could eat a, you know, some stupid little sandwich at a little coffee shop that was on 56th Street, you know, be quite happy with that. And then on the other side eat these incredible meals that would cost, even in those times, two hundred dollars with baked Alaska and, you know, fantastic meals of all kind. So, and in a way part of his saintliness was that he was an extraordinarily simple man, you know, he had no pretensions, he had no arrogance. He was humble to the point of being… really hurting himself, because there’s no question that the New York Philharmonic, certain members of the New York Philharmonic, treated him very, very badly after awhile. And, and he spoke often about that with tears in his eyes, you know. And he had no…he was probably partly sort of masochistic. That is to say, he didn’t know how to fight back and if somebody treated him badly he just took it. And that, that . . . and then musicians, other people began to take advantage of that, you know. So, no, he’s very dear to my memory and so much of what I am, I owe it to him. And I’m very happy to say that finally a very truthful biography of Mitropoulos has come out… ETZ: It’s a wonderful biography.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

GS: …by, yeah. So because there’s a lot of controversy about Mitropoulos’ career here in New York and Leonard Bernstein’s succession to Mitropoulos. In those years when Mitropoulos was conducting, of course as I mentioned I played often with the New York Philharmonic because whenever there was an extra horn situation, he insisted that I be the one. And if I was free at the Met, then, you know I would play. So I remember playing a glorious performance of Götterdämerung, the Third Act of Götterdamerung, as a concert performance, you know, with him. Many, many fantastic things that he did, Mahler Ninth Symphony…so again…but I was going to say something about…Yeah, what’s interesting is as you mentioned, he was doing David Diamond’s music, he was doing all kinds of music that was not in the Second Viennese School and I remember early on in the early ‘50s when Mitropoulos first came to the New York Philharmonic, I remember being a little bit mad at him because he hadn’t discovered me. I mean, isn’t that stupid? Isn’t that childish, you know? ETZ: Well, that’s kind of composerly. [laughs] GS: And he did a piece by…what’s that composer’s name? Roy Travis? Was there such a composer? No. Something with Travis, which was, I don’t know, to me not a very significant piece. But evidently somewhere he had made a promise to this composer to perform the New York Philharmonic. And very often he got stuck with pieces that all of us thought, “Why is he doing that?” You know, not only stylistically, but it wasn’t very important music. And then once he discovered me, which was essentially at the Metropolitan Opera, by the way, and a little bit through my father. My father was saying, “You know, you know… ETZ: My son… GS: …Gunther’s a very fine composer. You should look at his music.” That’s how he got to do the Brass Symphony, not only at the Philharmonic, but he made the first recording of that. Yeah.

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

ETZ: Let’s talk about the Brass Symphony a little bit. Tell us about the genesis of this, this piece. GS: Yeah… ETZ: Because it, to my knowledge, this is sort of when you first burst onto the scene. GS: That’s true. I remember when the…after the Philharmonic played the piece, I started getting letters from Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber and, and, and Bill Schumann and Walter Piston, people who had hadn’t known anything about me and were in a different musical camp, so to speak. And letters of admiration, how I handled the brass, I remember Aaron Copland saying something in the letter like, “I haven’t ever dared to do the things you do with those brass instruments.” Of course, being a horn player and hanging out with all these great musicians in New York in the NBC and the, the freelancers, New York Philharmonic, whatever, I knew the brass instruments intimately and I was aware of the fact that they had, technically and musically, talent way beyond what they were ever called upon to play. ETZ: That’s true. GS: So I wrote this, you know, big symphony, which, which of course turned out to be difficult even for those great musicians. But the real origin of that was not…it had nothing to do with New York. It goes back to my Cincinnati days because in Cincinnati the head of the wind ensemble at the university, at the conservatory in Cincinnati, a man named Ernest Glover, he had a very fine brass ensemble, which was kind of unique in those days. I mean brass ensemble, one had wind ensembles, one had concert bands, of course. ETZ: Was Betty Glover his daughter?

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division)

GS: His wife. ETZ: His wife? GS: His wife, yeah. And Ernie at one point, when, when…he knew me as a composer. He played bass in the Cincinnati Symphony, so we were very close friends. I don’t know how he came to this idea, but he asked me in 1949 to write a piece for his ensemble, which I did and, by the way, free. There was no money exchanged. In those days, you know, a commission meant that you got to write a piece for nothing for somebody. And… happy to do it. And I wrote the piece with great enthusiasm and I think very, very quickly. And he actually premiered the first three movements of the four movement symphony. He didn’t do the fourth movement because that is technically the most difficult one and his group couldn’t, couldn’t play it. So the, the actual first performance then took place later, here in New York with Leon Barzan conducting in one of the, I think it was an ISCM concert or something like that. And then I had a, I had a…I guess it was a tape of that because tape came in in the late 1940s. 1948, I think. And…which a lot of people forget nowadays, you know. It’s something…And I was able to send Mitropoulos the tape, you know. And, and I think when he heard that piece he really said, “Wow, this is a composer I’d really like to perform.” Anyway, so…and that was one of my early twelve-tone pieces where I was beginning to grapple with the whole issue of writing essentially twelve-tone or serial music, but also with me being so involved with the whole orchestral literature, wishing always, as I still do today, to make a connection to the past traditions. Now, that . . . I’m not talking about neoclassicism. I’m talking about . . . ETZ: A beautiful sound. GS: Well, hopefully beautiful sounds. Also, not abandoning any aspects of composition, whether it’s harmony or melody or counterpoint or polyphony or form or whatever. Which, you know, a lot of composition nowadays has decided this thing is obsolete, you know, this we don’t need anymore and so on. I believe very firmly that the greatest music has always

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617 Library of Congress (Music Division) come out of . . . from a composer who has been an innovator but has also respected the previous tradition in which he grew up, he or she grew up. So that you have this wonderful balance of bringing up the past into the future or into the present and then building upon that past. [End of Part 1] This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us a www.loc.gov

Gunther Schuller interviewed by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich at Carnegie Hall on April 21, 1998. Part 1. : http://www.loc.gov/item/ ihas.200217617