Composer builds a bridge between classical and jazz

Gunther Schuller's new 'Encounters' furthers the union

By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff, 10/19/2003

"This is a piece I have wanted to write for 10 years," says Gunther Schuller about his latest work, "Encounters," which he composed for next weekend's celebrations of the centennial of Jordan Hall, the great concert hall at the New England Conservatory.

In another sense, though, this composition for large symphony orchestra, jazz ensemble, and eminent jazz soloists is a work Schuller has probably had on his mind for more than five times that long. In the 1940s, Schuller was the young principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony. The son of a violinist in the New York Philharmonic, he had spent his entire life surrounded by classical music. Then, in Cincinnati, he encountered the music of Duke Ellington, which began a fascination with jazz that continues to this day. His two analytical books on jazz history stand as classics in the field.

In New York, in 1957, Schuller was principal horn of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and a prominent figure on the new-music scene. After he'd finished at the Met, he'd head out to listen and play in nearby jazz clubs. In a speech that year, he coined a term for something that had begun to happen, something he wanted to carry further: a merging of the mainstream of classical music and the mainstream of jazz. Something new, he was convinced, would emerge from this confluence -- a "third stream."

"I created this metaphor to describe a coming together that had already begun in certain works of Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, and Louis Gruenberg," Schuller said recently. "It wasn't just me. Ralph Burns was going to the concerts of the New York Philharmonic, and so was Bix Beiderbecke. Composers like Copland were writing in the jazz idiom, but they never used improvisation, which is the heart and soul of jazz. I wrote a piece for the Modern Jazz Quartet and orchestra, and Duke Ellington wrote `Night Creatures' for jazz ensemble and orchestra -- works like these helped bring improvisation into the genre."

This process has taken a while -- classical players hadn't been trained to improvise, and they were afraid to. And as Schuller points out, some jazz players lost their spontaneity when confronted with written music. The classical music field was getting used to dealing with highly chromatic and nontonal music; 40 years ago, only a few jazz players had learned to hear atonally.

Now, of course, all of that has changed. "Third Stream has different names nowadays," Schuller says. "It has expanded to include ethnic and vernacular music of all kinds. People call it world music or fusion. I was an early apostle of fusion."

Now 78, newly slimmed down and operating with renewed energy, Schuller remains as busy as ever. Out of the last 36 weeks, he has been home in Newton for only nine; he travels widely as a guest conductor and says he has to because he is self-employed. He's never held a job with a pension -- including the presidency of the New England Conservatory, a position he occupied between 1967 and 1977, one of the most exciting and fecund periods of the school's history. He was a natural person to approach to write a centennial piece for Jordan Hall, and he knew immediately he wanted to write "Encounters."

"After all, I established the jazz department here," he says.

"My piece, like Duke Ellington's, requires a real integration," he continues. "There is playing by each separate orchestra, but there is also cross-fertilization -- the jazz group plays classical stuff, and the classical orchestra plays jazz things. Each group works with some of the same materials, only interpreted differently."

Schuller wrote the piece (which lasts 15 to 18 minutes) in two-plus weeks -- it has taken him longer to copy the parts, he says, than to compose the music. "One of the most remarkable aspects of the experience," Schuller says, "is that I composed two of the sections in a dream. I started to dream music five or 10 years ago, but this time I dreamed this music so often, four or five times in a given night, that I remembered every detail of the music and could write it down, almost like a stenographer. It proved to me that people really do compose unconsciously or subliminally."

Schuller says he is a realist and was initially reluctant to consider the dream music as part of his new piece. "There were questions I had to answer. Was it any good? Was it good enough? Did it fit in with the rest? But by the light of day it seemed to me that it did."

Has he composed a piece that will have only one performance? Schuller worries about this, but not too much. "Only in a school could you do something like this that calls for so many performers -- about 150 of them, including five keyboardists and two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, bass oboe, bass trumpet, and other unusual instruments. Symphony orchestras would look at the instrumentation, count the costs, and back off. But I jumped at the chance to do this -- opportunities like this don't come along every day. This is the ultimate Third Stream piece." (And there are lots of music schools out there, and most of them have followed Schuller's lead and created jazz departments.)

Ken Schaphorst, chair of jazz studies and improvisation at the conservatory, has been coordinating the jazz end of "Encounters" -- and indeed of the whole three-day Jordan Hall centennial. "Listening to the rehearsals of Gunther's piece is really amazing; he knows jazz as well as anyone, and he can get our kids to swing like the Ellington band. He is very specific, telling the saxophones to change their reeds so they can play softer, urging all the musicians to play across a wider dynamic range. "At the same time he understands the classical orchestra in every detail and can tell the students to play something the way they would play it in Schoenberg's `Gurrelieder.' His work speaks for the idea of fusion more eloquently than any words could. Now people marry different kinds of music without thinking twice about it, but most of the time it is in the genre of popular music; there is nothing modern about it. Gunther combines different kinds of music within his personal, modern aesthetic -- his idea has entered the mainstream, but he is still doing new things. This music represents where he is at this moment."

The Saturday-night concert at which "Encounters" will be premiered is oversubscribed. But the New England Conservatory has planned a weekend of events, Friday-Sunday, to celebrate Jordan Hall's centennial, including performances, an open house and tours of the hall, and a "petting zoo" of instruments. Call 617-585-1122 or visit www.newenglandconservatory.edu/centennial.