'Where the Word Ends,' he keeps on

Gunther Schuller set to unveil new work with BSO

Even at 83, Newton composer Gunther Schuller keeps a grueling schedule; he's currently working on two orchestra commissions and is the artistic director of the Northwest Bach Festival. (Essdras M. Suarez / Globe Staff)

NEWTON - Gunther Schuller is lousy with titles. He's written nearly 200 pieces of music in his life, most of them major orchestral works, and coming up with names for them is like pulling teeth. To make matters worse, orchestra directors these days clamor to know a commissioned work's name before a measure of music is written. And don't get Schuller started on the current vogue for lofty, poetic titles, although he knows dozens of composers with notebooks full of them.

"They write a piece and slap some title on it and it's usually something like 'The Moon is Drifting Under the Bridge' or 'The Trees are Falling to the Left' that don't mean anything," Schuller says. "I'm just not into that."

But the composer is exceedingly, uncharacteristically pleased with how he's christened his latest creation, a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra that will receive its world premiere Feb. 5-7. The work is a single movement, 25 minutes long, for a large orchestra. Beyond that, Schuller is hard-pressed to describe it. Hence, the title: "Where the Word Ends."

"When we run out of ways to say things, we turn to music and other artistic expressions," Schuller says. "And regardless of whether my music is any good, I think the title is really one of the most beautiful definitions of music itself."

At 83, with a storied career straddling classical music and jazz as a composer, conductor, performer, and educator, Schuller is still pushing the edges of his own envelope. In "Where the Word Ends" he's deepened and expanded on ideas - from the piece's complex structure to its unusually lush layering of instruments - to such a degree that the composer perceives them as breakthroughs. Still more remarkable, Schuller figures he wrote it in roughly 20 to 30 hours.

"I've always been very fluent at writing at tremendous speed, but this one really flowed out of me," he says. "It was almost eerie. Lately this has been happening to me, maybe it's ancient age, but for 'Where the Word Ends' I almost didn't even have to think what the next note would be. It was like an improvisation."

After composing, the hard work begins. Schuller spends hundreds upon hundreds of hours painstakingly writing out full scores of his compositions by hand. On a recent Saturday afternoon, the man who says he's world famous for being more inexhaustible than James Brown is clearly beat. His hands are flecked with black ink and Wite-Out. Music scores are piled high in the living room, the dining room, and the hall, alongside towering stacks of books, jumbles of cards and photos, tangles of plants and scattered LPs. Portraits of Schuller are everywhere. This rambling old house, like its sole inhabitant, is brimming.

Schuller is currently at work on two of five orchestra commissions. The weekend we met he was editing reams of music for the Spokane, Wash.-based Northwest Bach Festival, of which he is artistic director, and where he spent the last two weeks of January. While "Where the Word Ends" receives its maiden performance this week, the music isn't new; the piece was originally scheduled to debut during the BSO's 2006-07 season. According to Schuller, he and BSO music director James Levine had the same realization at the same time, around a month before the performance: It was the end of a grueling season, Schuller's piece was part of an especially full and challenging program, and the work was going to get short shrift.

Levine beat Schuller to the phone by a day.

"When I got the score it was a bigger piece than I had expected and I had no choice but to plan a program that would really put it in the right context, with the right rehearsal time," says Levine. "I think it's Gunther's greatest orchestra piece."

Schuller is the sort of gifted and prolific musician one imagines was bursting with talent as a child. In fact, he felt no particular interest in music as a youngster, although his father loved to tell the story of 5-year-old Gunther sitting in the bathtub, playing with his rubber ducky and singing the entire overture to "Tannhauser." Oddly enough, he became a composer first, before he could really play. Schuller had exhibited a marked lack of aptitude on both the violin, his father's instrument, and the piano, his mother's. But in 1936, when Schuller was 11 (and on his third attempt to learn an instrument, the flute), his younger brother Edgar received a toy xylophone for Christmas, and the idea suddenly popped into his head that he'd like to write music for the family to play together. He's still got the score: 30 bars for xylophone, flute, violin, and piano.

Schuller shortly found his instrument - French horn - and by 17 he was a high-school dropout and principal horn with the Cincinnati Symphony; at 19 he became a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

"There was obviously all this music in me and when I finally decided to be serious about it, all the stuff I had acquired subliminally burst out," Schuller says of his impossibly swift progress. "I did nothing but music from then on, 18 and 19 hours a day." Nearly three-quarters of a century later, his pace hasn't much slackened. "When people wonder how Gunther Schuller accomplished all that he did, part one of the answer is I didn't sleep very much."

The list of accomplishments is long; highlights include a Pulitzer and MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, seminal recordings with Miles Davis and Gil Evans, directing Tanglewood Music Center and serving as president of New England Conservatory. Some years after he announced to his ashen-faced parents that Duke Ellington was as great a composer as Beethoven, Schuller coined the term Third Stream, to describe a then-heretical marriage of jazz and classical idioms.

Renowned saxophonist Joe Lovano, who has released a handful of orchestral jazz albums and collaborated on numerous projects with Schuller, says that Schuller's influence transcends the garden-variety legacy.

"Wayne Shorter likes to say 'how do you rehearse the unexpected?' and that's a question Gunther inspired," Lovano explains. "He challenges everyone to dig deeper within the established framework, to bridge the area between written music and music from the soul."

With the passage of time, Schuller's life has become almost exclusively devoted to music. He used to travel the world with his wife, Marjorie Black, who died 16 years ago. (Their sons, George and Ed, are both jazz musicians.) A pair of young women he calls his secretaries see to Schuller's daily needs, arriving each day at the house he's lived in for 41 years to drive Schuller to the bank or the grocery store. He lives an isolated life, but hardly a quiet one. On the contrary.

"Some people say I'm a workaholic, but it's not work," Schuller says. "It's such an incredible joy to be this consistently involved with creating things. This is the best that we human beings can do. Why stop?"

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com.