Maestro Gunther Schuller dies at 89

Renowned composer and conductor Gunther Schuller, who had strong ties to Spokane and spent 20 years as artistic director of the Northwest Bach Festival, died Sunday in Boston. He was 89.

“He was a great musician. I loved him and we will miss him,” said his son, Ed Schuller, a bassist. “He had a great life; he lived his dream.”

As a composer, Schuller wrote more than 200 compositions, including solo and orchestral works, chamber music, opera and jazz. His orchestral work, “Of Reminiscences and Reflections,” dedicated to his wife, Marjorie Black, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

He was the leading proponent of the Third Stream movement fusing jazz and classical music. One of his most-played scores, “Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee” (1959), illustrated this aesthetic and showcased his interest in visual arts.

“For Gunther, music and music-making has always been personal,” said Verne Windham, program director for Spokane Public Radio and former principal horn of the Spokane Symphony. “Gunther tended to go to an orchestra to guest conduct and call every musician by name. And Gunther built great friendships around his musical relationships.”

Gertrude Harvey, the executive director of the Northwest Bach Festival, worked with Schuller from 1992 to 2013.

“It was an incredible time,” Harvey said. “He loved Spokane. … He has lots of friends in the Northwest.”

She said Schuller’s passions ranged from politics to sports to gardening. “Certainly music was his life, but he had so many interests and was always knowledgeable about so many things,” she said. “A true genius, for sure, and a great friend.”

In addition to the Bach festival, Schuller worked with the Spokane Symphony in the mid-1980s, served as artistic director of the Festival at Sandpoint from 1985 to 1998, and was a principal guest conductor of the Spokane Jazz Orchestra.

Schuller first came to Spokane in 1982 as a guest conductor with the symphony, which was in crisis from a dispute between the musicians and its music director. Two years later, he returned for a season as artistic adviser when the symphony suddenly was without a music director.

“And Gunther, by coming here when Spokane so badly needed him, bonded very closely with this community,” Windham said.

Schuller, born on Nov. 22, 1925, in New York, came from a family of classical musicians. His grandfather was a conductor in Germany and his father was a violinist with the New York Philharmonic for more than 40 years.

He began his career in the 1940s playing French horn with the Cincinnati Symphony and Metropolitan Opera, but his love of jazz led him to also become involved in New York’s bebop scene. He played on trumpeter Miles Davis’ seminal “Birth of the Cool” 1949-50 recording session. He went on to perform and record with such jazz greats as J.J. Johnson, Eric Dolphy, Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus.

In the 1950s, Schuller worked with pianist John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet to bring jazz and classical music together in what he called the Third Stream.

By the 1960s, he had largely given up performing to focus on composing, teaching and writing. He served as president of the New England Conservatory in Boston from 1967-77, where he established the first degree-granting jazz program at a major classical conservatory and instituted the Third Stream department with pianist Ran Blake as its chair.

He also founded the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble, which earned a Grammy Award for best chamber music performance in 1973 for the album “Joplin: The Red Back Book” and helped spur a ragtime revival. Schuller won two more Grammys for writing liner notes.

In 1990, Schuller and David Baker founded and conducted the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra in Washington, D.C., dedicated to performing and preserving American jazz masterpieces.

When Schuller took over the Northwest Bach Festival in 1993, eyebrows were raised in the music world. His reputation as a composer was largely in modern 12-tone music – a long, long way from Bach.

“Here comes this 12-tone composer, either famous or infamous, depending on where you stand on that, and, gosh, this guy does a Bach festival?” he recalled in a 2013 interview. “How dare he? How can he do that? Of course, that’s a stupid question, because I’ve studied Bach since I was a teenager.”

He said he was proud of what the festival had become – an expanded celebration including Bach pieces along with works from carefully selected pre-Bach and post-Bach composers, and a showcase for talent from all over the world.

“Music is music, and Gunther is deep down a fundamentalist, meaning that he deals with the essence and core of music outside fashion or style. Gunther was in a position to take the work of Bach, for which he was not a specialist, and find what was fundamental, what was basic to that music,” said Windham, who plans to pay tribute to Schuller on today’s “Morning Classical” program at 9 a.m.

Schuller stepped down from the Bach festival in 2013, conducting two of the festival’s four concerts that year. Zuill Bailey was named to succeed him. Schuller told The Spokesman-Review, “It’s about time I find some leisure to actually read a book that I buy, or listen to some recordings.”

He also worked on the second part of his autobiography. The first, “Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty,” was published in 2011 and covered his career up to 1960. One book critic said Schuller is the “only musician in the world who can claim to have played with Maria Callas, Miles Davis, Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra, Igor Stravinsky and Arturo Toscanini.”

Schuller received Columbia University’s William Schuman Award for lifetime achievement in American music composition in 1988, and the MacArthur Foundation “genius” award in 1991. In 2008, he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation’s highest jazz honor.

Earlier this year, the MacDowell Colony, a prestigious artists’ residence program, awarded him its lifetime achievement award “for setting an example of discovery and experimentation” as a composer and teacher.

Despite his poor health, Schuller gave the commencement address May 16 at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

“One of his last thoughts to the students was, ‘Life is short, don’t waste a minute of it.’ It was very touching to hear him say that,” Harvey said.