Gunther Schuller has developed a musical career that ranges from composing and conducting to his extensive work as an educator, administrator, music publisher, record producer, and author. At the age of seventeen, Mr. Schuller was principal French hornist with the Cincinnatti Symphony; two years later he was appointed to a similar position with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. In 1959 he gave up performing to devote himself primarily to composition. He has fulfilled commissions from major orchestras throughout the world and, since 1980, has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among other awards, he has received two Guggenheim fellowships, the Darius Milhaud Award, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Award, and numerous honorary degrees. He was the 1989 receipient of Columbia University's William Schuman Award for lifetime achievement in American music composition, and in June 1991 was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation with one of the coveted MacArthur Awards. In 1993, Downbeat Magazine honored Mr. Schuller with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to jazz. A composition written for the Louisville Symphony, Of Reminiscences and Reflections, won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
As a conductor, Mr. Schuller travels throughout the world, leading major ensembles in widely varied repertory. As an educator, he has taught at the Manhattan School of Music and at Yale University, and served as head of the composition department at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood from 1963 until 1984. During the last fourteen of those years he was the Center's Artistic Director. In 1967, Mr. Schuller was appointed President of the New England Conservatory of Music in which he served until 1977. During his tenure at the Conservatory he helped reintroduce the music of Scott Joplin to the American public, in part through his development of the New England Conservatory Ragtime Ensemble, which won a 1973 Grammy Award for its performance of Joplin's The Red Back Book. Since 1984 he has been Artistic Director of the Festival at Sandpoint, Idaho. Mr. Schuller has written dozens of essays and four books, including the encyclopedic study, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz - 1930-1945. His latest book, The Compleat Conductor, was released in August 1997 through Oxford University Press.
Mr. Schuller is Editor-In-Chief of Jazz Masterworks Editions and Co-Director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra in Washington, D.C., both of which projects seek to sustain America's jazz performance traditions. Another recent effort of preservation was his editing and posthumous premiering at Lincoln Center in 1989 of Charles Mingus' immense final work, Epitaph, subsequently released on Columbia/Sony Records. Gunther Schuller also serves as a consultant to the Northeastern University Press in Boston.
