608-252-6188 In his rented lodgings on the UW-Madison campus, Gunther Schuller leans over a card table with a dictionary and a magnifying glass to work on his autobiography the same way he would approach a piece of music as a conductor: with painstaking, meticulous attention to what's on the printed page and adherence to the well-researched facts.
If anyone has volumes to say about how classical music and jazz performance arced their ways through his life and 20th-century American culture, it's Schuller, now a spry 79 and one of music's most celebrated modern renaissance men. For more than 50 years, Schuller has indefatigably pursued not one, but six highly successful, parallel careers: as performer (at 17, he became principal horn player for the Cincinnati Symphony), composer, conductor, jazz historian, music publisher and educator.
Recounting his past in longhand with a mechanical pencil on yellow legal pads, Schuller has spent much of the past three years just getting into the 1960s - composing, in other words, an 800-page Volume One of what he expects to be a multi-part autobiography.
"I must document this unbelievable life I've had, in both jazz and classical music," explains Schuller, whose career award list includes the Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy, a MacArthur "genius" grant and 10 honorary degrees. "(It's been) rich and privileged - not rich financially, but rich in content."
This fall, Schuller has been passing on the lessons of his extraordinary life to students as the UW Arts Institute's interdisciplinary artist in residence.
Seven of his compositions will be performed Thursday in a faculty concert in Mills Hall. Pieces like his "Five Moods for Tuba Quartet" and "Lines and Contrasts for 16 Horns" will feature some of the composer's jazz arrangements and famously atonal style. On Tuesday, he'll lead the UW Symphony Orchestra in "Revisiting Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel," a free lecture-demonstration on score interpretation.
Schuller, credited with reviving the New England Conservatory of Music as its director from 1967 to 1977 (during which he reintroduced Scott Joplin's ragtime music to the American public), will celebrate his upcoming birthday in Boston with a salute by the conservatory, Harvard and the Boston Symphony. Schuller turns 80 on Nov. 22, also the feast day of music's patron saint, Cecilia.
He'll finish the semester back in Madison, at a university he's visited many times but where he's teaching the first full college courses, complete with syllabi, of his career.
"He's just a wealth of knowledge," says Susan Kirschbaun, a second-year master's degree student in horn performance and Schuller's student assistant in his course called "The Compleat Performer." "It's real neat how happy he is. He's just full of life."
"I am a very happy person," the buoyant Schuller explains, "because work is not work for me. Work is my life. ... I'm just eternally curious and voracious in my appetite" for music.
Self-taught in every discipline but horn playing, Schuller says he has "commissions up to here" for new compositions, but has set them aside to tackle his autobiography - and take the financial consequences.
"In effect, I'm losing money" by working on the book, explains Schuller, who despite his contributions to American music has no pension to rely on. "I happen to be in a position, because I'm self-employed, that I have no financial safety net of any kind except my savings, which can disappear in one year if you get sick in this country."
Schuller's spirits only seem to flag when he reflects on the arts in contemporary America, where only 3 percent of the population listens to music venturing beyond mass-marketed, profit-driven offerings, he says.
"I'm disheartened by the total cultural media-controlled landscape of the United States. But I am not disheartened - and I'm encouraged - by what I see in every nook and cranny in this country, in very small amounts, of intelligent, curious, enterprising people who are not yet dumbed-down by our culture and our media."
Not just a champion of classical music, Schuller is also one of its purists. For his 1997 book "The Compleat Conductor" he listened to 450 symphony recordings with the original score in his lap, comparing the composer's work to its interpretation by world-renown conductors.
Schuller will demonstrate his "Compleat Conductor" approach in Tuesday's concert and uses it in his UW classes.
"I've never analyzed music the way Mr. Schuller expects of us," horn student Kirschbaum says. "That way of thinking has forced itself into my daily practicing habits.
"It almost seems ridiculous of him to ask of us what he asks of us," she says. But when Kirschbaum and other students try to take their music to the heights Schuller demands, "the musicianship just explodes out of it."
What: The UW School of Music faculty presents "The Music of Gunther Schuller" in concert.
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