As with Aaron Copland, I first heard the music of Gunther Schuller on a New York Philharmonic CBS TV broadcast of a Bernstein Young People’s concert in the early 1960s. I don’t remember the specific pieces on that program, but I do recall that the subject of the concert was Schuller’s “Third Stream” concept. The first two streams were the classical and the jazz genres, and Schuller’s music combined elements of both, tending more in the direction of the intellectual/classical side than in the decades earlier direction of popular composers like George Gershwin or Ferde Grofe.
My first live encounter with Gunther Schuller was in January 1967, when he came to guest conduct the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. I was still a student, but I was playing in the RPO as an extra percussionist. The Principal Percussionist at that time was Robin Engelman, and the main piece on the program was the 4th Symphony of Charles Ives with Yuji Takahashi as the pianist. There is one section in the Ives when the orchestra is divided into two separate parts, and the big newsflash of the day was that Schuller would conduct both parts simultaneously, which he did to perfection.
The next time Gunther Schuller came to the RPO was in February 1970. Robin had moved to the Toronto Symphony and I was now the RPO Principal Percussionist. The program included not only music by Ives and Schuller, but also Mozart and Schumann.
Curiously, the pianist in the Mozart was a very young Christoph Eschenbach. Decades later, in March 2000, Eschenbach would conduct Takemitsu’s “From me flows what you call Time” with NEXUS and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 2005 Eschenbach again conducted the Takemitsu work with NEXUS in Germany at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival.
Small world! . . . especially in music.
Schuller returned to Rochester once more in February 1977 to conduct the premiere performance of his “Concerto for Violin & Orchestra” with Zvi Zeitlin as soloist. When the percussion parts to the Concerto arrived in the orchestra’s library about a month before the performances, I was unsettled to find a glockenspiel part with three consecutive pages of 32nd-notes - in musicians’ lingo . . . these were “black pages” with more ink visible than white paper. I remember taking a very deep breath, knowing that after all, this was a piece by Gunther Schuller, and surely he would be paying attention to every single note. Therefore, the only possible route for me was to set aside a significant amount of ‘woodshed’ time. This I did.
Upon closer study, it seemed to me that the glockenspiel part was composed in a twelve-tone row style, but after much effort at trying to shortcut my practice time by discovering any internal note patterns, I found none . . . absolutely none. Furthermore, since this would be a premiere, there were no recordings available. I would have to learn the part the old fashioned way, note-by-note. This I did, and by the first rehearsal I was totally ready to ‘nuke’ the part and impress the heck out of the composer.
The first reading of the music proceeded, and just as my glockenspiel part was to begin, the orchestra exploded into a tutti fortissimo, with a volley of individual instrument voices that completely masked my entire part. I remember thinking to myself (I know how sacrilegious this sounds) that the glockenspiel part could have been completely improvised and still have produced virtually the same effect. Meanwhile, my hopes for well-deserved public praise from the conductor/composer, not to mention all of the invested practice hours, were forever dashed.
Through all of the rehearsals and concerts, Schuller never said a word to me about the glockenspiel part. Nevertheless, my personal problems aside, the Concerto is a really good piece, and the performances were very well received by the audiences.