classical | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

July 1, 2015

Gunther Schuller, RIP: A Life Inside Music

When he was just a young musician, Gunther Schuller decided on four hours of sleep a night. At 18, Schuller told us, “I figured out, ‘God damn it: if I sleep eight hours a night, I’m ...

When he was just a young musician, Gunther Schuller decided on four hours of sleep a night. At 18, Schuller told us, “I figured out, ‘God damn it: if I sleep eight hours a night, I’m going to piss away a third of my life.’” He then stuck to that regimen for fifty or sixty years of work.

Schuller, who died last week at 89, was a prodigious, captivated, sometimes cantankerous prisoner of every kind of modern music: between Beethoven and Bill Evans, Igor Stravinsky and Charlie Parker, and his own atonal compositions, which he was still getting ready right up until the end. In one of his last interviews, Schuller showed us what he did with the extra hours: refining a taste, and building a biography, that passed through all the musical streams of the past century.

He began in earnest at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1940s as a teenage prodigy on the French horn, the same horn he played with Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” nonet in the 1950s. Schuller revived the New England Conservatory in the 1960s and ’70s and, inside it, revived the ragtime jazz that became the soundtrack of the Robert Redford and Paul Newman blockbuster movie, The Sting.

We interviewed Schuller at his house in Newton, a shrine to the loves of his life. It’s a home he made with his beloved wife, Majorie, and gave over to a grand piano topped with piles of sheet music, a wall of vinyl records, and hallways full of scores and programs. (You can get a look inside in this short documentary on Schuller recorded last year, amid the melting snow.)

Gunther Schuller was a music writer of the first rank: his histories of jazz are still considered definitive. And the first volume of his autobiography, A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty, thrums with the New York of his youth, what he remembers as, day and night, a “cultural paradise for all the world”: a mélange of jazzmen, artists, filmmakers, curators, African-Americans and German-Jewish emigrés, in a game of endless artistic oneupmanship.

So of course it was Schuller, up late with his beloved wife, down Broadway between the Met and the jazz clubs, who went on to decree that “all musics are created equal.” Above a certain level, past which genius “changes the language of music,” it’s all pure democracy, and silly to say that Beethoven was better or worse than Mozart — or Duke Ellington: “No matter what its label, if something is perfect — well, then, it’s perfect.”

On July 4th weekend, we’re remembering Gunther Schuller. There was no more passionate guide to the many tones, feelings, and forward leaps of the musical 20th century in America, down to the vibrations in the pit of the Met.

Gunther’s Desert Island Discs

We talked about a lot of music in this hours-long conversation, but our new intern and producer Grant Holub-Moorman assembled a playlist of the best of it. From jazz virtuosos to The Rite of Spring, it’s perfect music born on the cutting edge.

Schuller accompanied his recommendations with opinions, technical observations, and stories — like this one, of a chance encounter at the East Side apartment of the Baroness von Koenigswaerter, one of jazz’s most memorable patrons in America:

…She had this huge apartment near the United Nations building, and that was a hangout for musicians. And by the way, when you walked into that — whatever number of rooms it was — man, you would get high just by being in there: oh, God!

There wasn’t very much furniture in half of that place; there were just mattresses on the floor. And so all the musicians gathered there, just as they wanted to. She did an open house…

Well, one night I went there. I wanted to meet somebody, I can’t remember who. And I laid down on one of these mattresses, and I kind of held my nose and ears. And Bird comes along: “Hey, Charlie!” And he stayed and laid down on a mattress near me. We talked about things, bad and good, in jazz and society and so on…

We lay there for a while, and Charlie said, “Gunther, I can’t stand it any more.” And he started: “I’ve played every kind of music I can play, I’ve played every kind of blues that I can play. I can’t do it anymore, because I know there’s” — I’m paraphrasing, of course — “I know out there there’s other great music, and I so much want to learn it.” And he mentioned, in particular, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which he had heard. I think John Lewis had told him to listen to it. John was doing the same kind of thing: trying to get musicians enriched in the other type of language.

It was terrifying. He started almost crying. He said, “I want to study with you.” And I said, “Of course, of course.” Then it never happened, because (a), one time he said he was gonna come — he never showed up. And another time, his saxophone was in a hock shop, a pawn shop… And three months later he died.

Parker died watching TV on the sofa of the same apartment, on March 12, 1955. The New York Times notice three days later is below. The police and the Times were famously wrong about Bird’s age: at his death he was 34 years old.

Schuller called our attention to another such melancholy moment, on television: the famous final concert of Billie Holiday and Lester Young, together on CBS’s The Sound of Jazz, on December 8, 1957. The song was “Fine and Mellow”:

…Lester and Billie hadn’t seen each other in a while. I kind of feel that they were in love with each other. Lester was in such bad shape at that time that the producer had begun to decide, “We can’t have him perform; he can’t do it.” Then they had a meeting amongst the musicians and they finally said, “Listen: we cannot do this program without Lester Young. Whatever happens.”

And so then he played. He played only 12 bars. I’m gonna choke up now. And Billie sang it a thousand times. And she stood there looking at him, about ten feet away from him. If you ever saw love expressed on a film, in this music, it was that moment.

Podcast • April 24, 2014

Teju Cole: the Consummate Mahlerian

As part of our education in the music of Gustav Mahler, we spoke with the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole. In his triumphant debut titled Open City in 2011, Teju Cole built his story to a climactic ...

As part of our education in the music of Gustav Mahler, we spoke with the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole. In his triumphant debut titled Open City in 2011, Teju Cole built his story to a climactic performance of Mahler’s 9^th Symphony in Carnegie Hall. Teju Cole lives and writes in New York. He’s a bit of a Mahler obsessive who tweets often about his favorite composer. I asked him how Mahler enters the mind and the spirit of a young New Yorker who grew up in West Africa.

By the Way • March 24, 2014

Gustavo Dudamel: Stardust from El Sistema Heaven

“I’m not a great singer,” Gustavo Dudamel told the kids in a teaching aside on Saturday in an El Sistema rehearsal with the Longy School at MIT on Saturday. “But of course I sing in the shower,” he said, working up a conversational lather. Here was the point, in spirit and in so many words: “We sing in the orchestra, same way we sing in the shower. You know how you get to love that big, long line you’re singing — clearer and stronger when you’re into it. We want to take it right to the point where the people in the next apartment start banging on the wall and shout: ‘We get it! Now shut up.’”

This is how we make music in Gustavo Dudamel’s world: intense focus, intense fun together. For 60 minutes or so, El Sistema-trained teenagers from public schools in Boston, Somerville and nearby worked several times through Bizet’s “Farandole” and the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony with the mesmerizing maestro of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Not once did the conductor speak of tempo, articulation, or even being in tune. But he kept offering the kids images: the difference between a dancer with long legs and someone marching on short legs, for example. Every coaching point was about adding colors for the listeners, making the musical experience more dynamic in the ensemble, a life lesson closer to home for the young players.

The life lesson was humility in triumph for the surprise star of the rehearsal show, the 9-year-old timpanist Francis Puente from the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Brighton. With his broken left wrist in a cast, Francis was working his kettle drums with just his right hand, ever with style and effect. Maestro Dudamel singled him out for recognition, and Francis smiled his thanks. His mother Maria Puente emailed the next morning: “But you know what was even more admirable with our son? While we were in the car, I asked him how he wanted to celebrate his wonderful achievement — maybe eat out in some nice restaurant, I suggested. He said he wanted to celebrate by just going home and having a quiet evening with us. He said, ‘I like being acknowledged and then being able to go back to the ordinary pace of life, like going into oblivion.’ What a blessing, too, for him to remain unaffected by all the attention he gets.”

Next day at Symphony Hall, under a thundering, tearful standing ovation, Maestro Dudamel took credit with Francis Puente’s taste for oblivion. Dudamel saluted his Los Angeles Philharmonic stars, embracing his horn soloist, his woodwind section, his brilliant cello duo who’d outdone themselves in the full Tchaikovsky 5. But to the end he stood hand in hand with the ranks of his first violins and violas. The most celebrated young conductor in the world today, the man we came to hear, never mounted the podium again after the music stopped. He declined to take a solo bow.

Podcast • March 20, 2014

Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music & Beauty, Part II

We're picking up the thread of a long conversation with Gunther Schuller. He’s the man who first mapped a Third Stream of “jazzical” music between classical and jazz temperaments. In this second half of our conversation, I’m asking a question I put to Richard Powers a couple of months ago: is there any summing up the 20th Century disruptions of tonality and rhythms in mainstream music?

We’re picking up the thread of a long conversation with Gunther Schuller, in his living room outside Boston. He’s been a sort of one-man vessel of many revolutions in 20th century music, a player of many parts, too: a French horn virtuoso in orchestras led by Toscanini and Fritz Reiner, a modern composer still winning commissions in his 89th year, a jazz player back in the day too with Miles Davis, Bill Evans and the Modern Jazz Quartet; also a principal big-book historian of jazz in its early, swing and modern eras; and all his life an instigator of things, like the Ragtime revival that went to Hollywood in the 60s and 70s.

He’s the man who first mapped a Third Stream of “jazzical” music between classical and jazz temperaments. So the thread in Gunther Schuller’s autobiography and our conversation so far has been the many musics in a sort of democracy of geniuses: Duke Ellington in the Pantheon with Beethoven and Mozart; Erroll Garner’s piano improvisations standing tall next to Shubert and Chopin. It was Gunther Schuller’s line years ago that “all musics are created equal.” By now his third stream is inundated by maybe 300 world streams of genius music.

In this second half of our conversation, I’m asking a question I put to Richard Powers, the musically astute novelist of Orfeo, a couple of months ago: is there any summing up the 20th Century disruptions in tonality and rhythms of mainstream music? And Gunther took it immediately to Igor Stravinsky, the Russian-born composer who started a riot in Paris in 1913 with “The Rite of Spring,” a riot that changed Gunther Schuller’s direction and in a sense, never ended.

Music in this show:

Louis Armstrong – Potato Head Blues

Igor Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring

Gunther Schuller – The Twittering Machine

John Lewis – Three Little Feelings

Ravi Shankar – Improvisations on the theme from ‘Panther Panchali’

Vijay Iyer – Brute Facts

Duke Ellington – Ko-ko

Duke Ellington – Harlem Air Shaft

Duke Ellington – Rockin’ in Rhythm

Duke Ellington – Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

John Coltrane – Coltrane Plays the Blues

John Lewis – Jazz Abstractions (composed by Gunther Schuller & Jim Hall)

Podcast • March 8, 2014

Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music & Beauty, Part I

Gunther Schuller is a composer, conductor, horn virtuoso, jazz historian and critic who had the nerve and the authority years ago to decree that “all musics are created equal.” He’s walked that walk through a 70-year career between Beethoven and Bill Evans, Igor Stravinsky and Charlie Parker. And he’s talking the talk with us the same way – old, new, jazz and classical music, back and forth intimately and equally because, as he says, “well, they’re equal.” Above a certain level where genius “changes the language of music,” it’s all democracy. “No matter what its label, if something is perfect, well then, it’s perfect.”

Gunther Schuller got started late, at age 11, without teachers but with any uncanny gift for reading music. He learned by studying scores, listening to records, and then feeling “the vibrations on the floor of the pit” with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestera. He made it to the Met in the 40s as a teenager on the French horn, the same horn he played with Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” nonet in the 50s. He revived the New England Conservatory in the 60s and 70s and, inside it, revived the ragtime jazz that became the soundtrack of the Robert Redford and Paul Newman blockbuster movie, The Sting. In his 89th year, Gunther Schuller has a dozen or more commissions for new pieces in his own a-tonal mode. And he’s assembling a second volume of autobiography. The first volume, A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty, runs 600 pages through the 1950s in the New York of his boyhood, what he remembers as, day and night, a “cultural paradise for all the world.”

Music in this show:

Thelonius Monk – Misterioso

Count Basie & His Orchestra – Broadway

Thelonius Monk with John Coltrane

Frederick Delius – Sea Drift

Alexander Scriabin – Piano Concerto in F sharp minor Op. 20

Alban Berg – Violin Concerto

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major, K. 216

Johnny Hodges – Funky Blues

Charlie Parker – Parker’s Mood

Duke Ellington – Rockin’ in Rhythm

Duke Ellington & His Orchestra – Things Ain’t What They Used to Be

Bille Holiday – Fine and Mellow from The Sound of Jazz

Erroll Garner – Lover

Milton Babbitt – All Set

Bill Evans – Some Other Time

November 29, 2006

Bach’s Chaconne

Despite what the “recorded” date says above, this show was recorded at 12:30 pm on December 1st, 2006, and was first broadcast on January 1st, 2007. I was excited to see last month that Arnold ...

Despite what the “recorded” date says above, this show was recorded at 12:30 pm on December 1st, 2006, and was first broadcast on January 1st, 2007.

I was excited to see last month that Arnold Steinhardt has a new book out. His first, Indivisible by Four, was a memoir of his life as the first violinist of the Guarneri string quartet, one of the most celebrated ensembles of the last forty years.

But I was thrilled when it turned out that the new book, Violin Dreams, an exploration of violins and violining, is bracketed by his lifelong, ever-increasing, Olympian challenge: the final movement of Bach’s Second Partita for unaccompanied violin. The Chaconne.

“It is hard to imagine a violinist who has passed through Bach’s gravitational field untouched,” Steinhardt wrote. “Bach was first my chore, gradually my interest, and finally my quest.” And if Bach in general was a quest, then the Chaconne, with its simple, yearning melody followed by the genetic pyrotechnics of replication and mutation, was a nearly holy calling. It’s also nearly impossible to play.

Or perhaps it’s truly impossible, forever just out of reach even for the best of the best. On the phone today, Steinhardt mentioned to me that it would have been fantastic to play the full fifteen-minute piece live for us on the show, had he just been given more time to practice… like five or six years. And this is a man who has twice recorded the Chaconne, and has performed his way through the entire solo and chamber music repertoire many times over for more than a half century. But this is also the Chaconne.

Steinhardt puts it this way:

To prepare for [a friend’s funeral] service, I had been practicing the Chaconne every day — fussing over individual phrases, searching for better ways to string them together, and wondering about the very nature of the piece, at its core an old dance form that had been around for centuries. After the many times I had heard and played the Chaconne, I had hoped it would fall relatively easily into place by now, but it appeared to be taunting me. The more I worked, the more I saw; the more I saw, the further away it drifted from my grasp. Perhaps that is in the nature of every masterpiece. But more than that, the Chaconne seemed to exude shadows over its grandeur and artful design. Exactly what was hidden there I could not say, but I would lose myself for long stretches of time exploring the work’s repeating four-bar phrases, which rose and fell and marched solemnly forward in ever-changing patterns.

Arnold Steinhardt, in Violin Dreams

So just what is it about these fourteen or fifteen minutes that they seem to get harder the more you play them? What’s the lure, for the listener or the violinist? Have you ever tried playing it — on the concert stage, or in your bedroom with the door locked? What’s your favorite rendition? (And is it on violin, or one of the myriad other transcriptions? Steinhardt heard a version on marimba.)

The fearless Steinhardt will be bringing his violin, not his marimba, to help illustrate and explicate what he calls “a mighty cathedral — imposing in length, moving and uplifting in spirit, and exquisite in its details.” What are your questions for someone who has scaled the Chaconne’s heights and come back to tell the story?

And a final question: so you’ve never played the Chaconne, or the violin, or the marimba. What forever just-unattainable goal are you pursuing, for the joy and frustration and transcendence of it?

Arnold Steinhardt

First Violinist, Guarneri String Quartet, author of Violin Dreams and Indivisible by Four