Remembering composer Gunther Schuller

American composer and conductor Gunther Schuller, who has died at the age of 89, was one of the most multifaceted musicians of the 20th century.

He worked with Miles Davis (playing French horn on the Birth of the Cool sessions), Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus; he composed more than 200 works of his own and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Reminiscences and Reflections.

As a conductor, he performed the great works of the classical canon, from Bach’s B minor Mass to Wagner’s Parsifal, from the great modernist works of Stravinsky and Schoenberg to the music of his younger contemporaries. A teacher and writer, he may be best remembered for coining the term ‘third stream’ in reference to music that sought to bring classical and jazz composition more closely together.

He was a guest of The Music Show several times, and in 1997 spoke to Andrew Ford about the musical upheavals that Arnold Schoenberg’s early 20th century abandoning of tonality caused ... and what happened next.

Andrew Ford: There’s been a post-modernist backlash against Schoenberg and a lot of the music which seemed to dominate at universities during the '50s and '60s. Why do you think modernist music did take such a stronghold of institutions?

Gunther Schuller: Did you ever hear about Hitler? When I grew up in the United States and started as a young composer, the world of music was divided into two viciously opposing camps. One was the Stravinskian and Copland-esque neoclassicism, and the other was the Schoenberg 12-tone school, the second Viennese school. These were absolutely opposing camps. I remember very well in my young years I was expected to join one camp or the other, to which I said, ‘Nonsense, that's silly. Stravinsky and Schoenberg are both great composers, probably the two greatest innovators of our century or early part of the century in any case, and I'm going to learn from both, study both, love both, and so on.’

The truth is that in those years the world of music, in terms of recording and what was broadcast, the whole business of music was dominated by the neoclassic school, monopolistically so. I remember very well when we young composers for the first time were able to hear works of Schoenberg or Berg or Webern, which had never been performed in the United States. Whereas we knew every piece by Stravinsky, every piece by Milhaud, every piece by Auric, every piece by even Britten or Shostakovich, but Schoenberg was at that time ostracised.

Then came this huge changeover in 1955, some of it generated in fact by Stravinsky when he turned coat and went over to the 12-tone school, which was of course a tremendous shock to Nadia Boulanger and Copland, who never recovered from that. Suddenly the neoclassic camp was out, and serialism and 12-tone and dodecaphonic music and so on was in, and particularly, as you suggest, in the academies. So it went from one ridiculous extreme to another ridiculous extreme.

Predictably, and I certainly predicted it many times in those years, this was all going to change again and there was going to be another backlash movement. So then came in the '70s all the new trends of minimalism and C-major music and the new tonality and all of that, which was obviously an artistic and professional backing away from these extremes of intellectualism which began to infest so much of the 12-tone and serial music. By the way, that does not mean that all of that music is trash, that all of that music is no good, there are masterpieces of that period, as there are masterpieces in the neoclassic school.

I think we should try not to think always in these monolithic terms of this school against that school, because any system, any technique, any concept of music, any philosophy, any ideology has a potential to create great music, depending on the composer. It's not the system that does anything. The system is meaningless, it's what a composer does with a system, whether it's the diatonic tonal system or the atonal system or aleatoric or whatever it may be. Of course every technique and system and concept also has the potential to produce lousy music depending, again, on the composer.

Related: Peter Sculthorpe, a composer’s life

I'm old enough—I'm 71 now—to have seen these incredible cyclical swings, these pendulum swings where it went from one stylistic extreme, and I mean this in the sense that monopolistic control of what got performed and what got recorded and what got broadcast, suddenly to a totally different arena, and then another pendulum swing back to still another one.

Then we come up with minimalism and a certain kind of overt simplification of music that we still have with us in many areas today. It is under that banner that Schoenberg and the 12-tone school of the second Viennese school are now pretty much trashed by most of the media and by institutions of music. But this will change again I predict, and in another five years there will be another swing back to something else.

AF: I wonder whether maybe we are actually reaching a time finally, as we almost hit the end of the 20th century, where it's possible to take the kind of point of view that you are taking, a pluralist one, to say that these things are actually all valid.

GS: No, you're absolutely right. There is, in a sense, a wonderful eclecticism about now where many, many concepts, many styles, many idioms are vying with each other. There’s ‘world music’, the whole world of ethnic musics have been discovered also in the last 15, 20 years, not really very seriously yet, but that's another major influence. There is a kind of pluralism which we never had before.

If you go back to the two camps of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and you now look at 60, 70 years later, the incredibly fragmented musical scene there is now where there are … 15, 16, 20 different styles and concepts, all competing with each other. Of course certain prophets of these certain styles yell a little bit louder get more attention in the media, but it's a very interesting and rich and fragmented and pluralistic scene.

I suppose if people learn from that, that there isn't one the kind of great music and that there isn't one kind of great system or ideology but that there are many possibilities in human nature. Just like the world of nature is full of thousands of species of wonderful animals and plants and whatnot, so in the arts there can be that same thing. For most of my life I think it was too polarised always, and for 50 years of my life have fought against that. I mean, after all, I'm so involved and have been all my life with jazz, for example.

I can tell you in the early days when I started playing jazz on the French horn with Miles Davis and John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet and all kinds of people, Mingus and so on, people on the classical side were outraged.

AF: I'm sure they were!

GS: I said to myself, ‘What are they getting so excited about? This is all great music. Duke Ellington is one of the greatest composers of all time, what's not to like about that or what's wrong if you get involved with his music?’

A lot of this has much more to do, unfortunately, with business and promotion and hype and media and all of that stuff, and I really have very little patience with all of that, and this pontificating that this is good music and this is bad music. The world is full of … what does it say in the Bible? Jesus said, 'My house is full of many mansions.' That's the way music is.

The Music Show is about the creation and enjoyment of music. On Saturdays, you’ll hear from touring artists and emerging trends. Who is playing and why, live music and the latest info on the national scene. Bach to beats and all things in between. On Sundays we delve more into the creation of music and thought process that go into creation and listening.