Schuller Celebrating Birthday Early

Thu., Feb. 10, 2000

Travis Rivers Correspondent

Gunther Schuller will celebrate his 75th birthday with the Spokane Symphony tonight.

The party is a little early, to be sure. Schuller was born Nov. 22, 1925, a birth date he shares with numerous other musicians, from Jacob Obrecht, the master of renaissance choral music; though J.S. Bach’s son Wilhelm Friedemann; to Benjamin Britten, the modern English master of opera and orchestral music, to say nothing of Scott Joplin, master of ragtime.

No wonder Nov. 22 is St. Cecilia’s Day, honoring the patron saint of music.

Schuller first conducted the Spokane Symphony 18 years ago and has appeared on its podium dozens of times since, both in performance in the Opera House and at The Festival at Sandpoint.

Tonight’s performance honors Schuller’s first concert in Spokane by including two works he conducted at that 1982 appearance: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 and Schuller’s “Seven Studies on Themes by Paul Klee.” Each of the Klee studies is based on a painting by the Swiss expressionist.

“When I was growing up,” the conductor said this week while in Spokane for rehearsals, “I always thought I’d become a painter. Some of the drawings and watercolors I did as a student are pretty darned good, even if I do say so. After I switched to composition, I still have always been interested in art, even to the point of being a collector, in a small way.”

Schuller’s “Klee Studies” is probably his best known work. “I used to keep track of the number of performances,” he says, “and when I stopped counting 10 or 15 years ago, there were 317 orchestras all over the world that had played those pieces.”

Schuller recently recorded the “Klee Studies” with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra Hannover for the GM label. The CD also includes two other Schuller art-inspired works, “Vertige d’Eros,” based on a surrealist painting by Roberto Matta, and “An Arc Ascending,” based on environmentalist photographs by Alice Weston.

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