“Gunther Schuller, one of America’s most wide-ranging musicians—a French horn prodigy and tireless advocate for bridging classical music and jazz—died Sunday morning in Boston, his son Ed Schuller said,” writes Anastasia Tsioulcas on Sunday (6/21) at NPR’s Deceptive Cadence site. “Extraordinarily active and influential as a composer, conductor and educator, he was also hailed as an author, publisher and record producer—and, not incidentally, as a friend and colleague of everyone from Miles Davis to Frank Zappa…. His father served as a violinist in the New York Philharmonic for more than four decades…. Schuller joined the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 1943 as its principal [French] horn player. He remained for two seasons before joining the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, where he served as principal until 1959.… He began teaching widely, first at the Manhattan School of Music in the early 1950s, and from 1963 to 1964 as a composition professor at Yale University…. He was Tanglewood’s artistic director from 1969 to 1984 [and] president of the New England Conservatory from 1967 to 1977…. He authored two books on jazz as well as The Compleat Conductor…. In 1994, Schuller won the Pulitzer Prize for his Of Reflections and Reminiscences, a large-scale tribute to his wife, Marjorie Black.”
Posted June 22, 2015
