Remembering Gunther (1925-2015)

By Joseph Horowitz

 

​Joseph Horowitz is a music historian and the Executive Director of the PostClassical Ensemble. He has long been a pioneer in classical music programming, beginning with his tenure as Artistic Advisor for the annual Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y. As Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, resident orchestra of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, he received national attention in the 1990s for “The Russian Stravinsky,” “American Transcendentalists,” “Flamenco,” and other festivals exploring the folk roots of concert works. Over the past three decades, Horowitz has created more than 100 interdisciplinary music festivals —including the annual American Composers Festival presented by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra.

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Called “a force in classical music today, a prophet and an agitator” by the New York Times, and “our nation’s leading scholar of the symphony orchestra” by Charles Olton, former President of the League of American Orchestras, Horowitz is also the award-winning author of ten books mainly dealing with the institutional history of classical music in the United States. Both his Classical Music in America: A History (2005) and Artists in Exile: How Refugees from 20th Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (2008) were named best books of the year by The Economist. As Project Director of an NEH National Education Project, as well as an NEH Teacher Training Institute, he is the author of a book for young readers entitled Dvořák in America, linked to a state-of-the-art DVD.

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I am privileged to have known three sui generis American musicians of Gunther Schuller’s generation. All three both composed and performed. It was always my opinion, my frustration, that they were not sufficiently esteemed and utilized. They could have contributed more had American classical music been less provincially attuned to European pedigrees.

 

One was Lukas Foss, who was my Conductor Laureate when I ran the Brooklyn Philharmonic in the 1990s. Previously, during my brief tenure as a New York Times music critic, it was I – because so low on the totem pole -- who was assigned to review Lukas’s Brooklyn Philharmonic concerts at BAM. They towered over the performances being given by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic across the river. As was equally little-known, Lukas was also one of the pre-eminent American pianists of his generation. And his crazy compositions always worked so long as he participated in their performance.

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Lukas would have made a bracing successor to his friend Leonard Bernstein when Bernstein resigned from the Philharmonic. In fact, as a darkhorse candidate, he was entrusted with a full month of New York Philharmonic subscription concerts in 1966. One of his soloists was Leon Kirchner, in Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto. I met Leon at the 92nd Street Y in the 1980s. He partnered Jaime Laredo in Mozart’s E minor Violin Sonata – the most heedlessly expressive Mozart playing I have ever heard. And he conducted Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony. After that revelatory performance, which treated the music as an old friend, the participating clarinetist told me: “I wish I’d had that experience before I recorded the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony with Orpheus.” Late in his life, Leon moved to the Upper West Side. He would regale me with his impressive Boston recordings, conducting Schoenberg and Sessions. One of the last times I saw him he was being visited by Carl Reiner, whom he knew from his days in Los Angeles studying composition with Schoenberg. (Reiner didn’t remember his stellar performance in one of my favorite “Show of Shows” sketches, lampooning Ted Mack’s “Amateur Hour.”)

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Gunther is of course the third sui generis musician on my list. He commanded the widest and most complete knowledge of American music of anyone I ever encountered. Decades before the internet and AI, I would ply him with questions over the phone. His answering voice invariably sounded careworn and fatigued – it meant nothing; he was always eager to talk. When writing Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, I needed to quickly acquire reliable impressions of all the conductors he had experienced in his horn-playing days. He especially loved to recall Dimitri Mitropoulos – how Mitropoulos’s eyes would cross when his intensity peaked; how (contradicting conventional wisdom) the New York Philharmonic’s standards of performance declined during the early Bernstein years, post-Mitropoulos. (These impressions, and so many others, may be found in Gunther’s autobiography.)  When I tried querying him about Fritz Reiner and George Szell, he told me to do some homework. I phoned back in a week or two to report that I had been listening to broadcasts and enjoyed Reiner but not Szell. Gunther shot back: “Attaboy!”

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Twice I was able to engage Gunter to conduct. The first occasion was a 1995 Brooklyn Philharmonic weekend I called “From Gospel to Gershwin.” This was an excavation of Black classical music long before it became fashionable. Gunther was apparently so little accustomed to being invited to guest-conduct that when I phoned him he was at first incredulous. I explained that I wished to entrust him with a pair of subscription concerts plus an additional Sunday afternoon “Interplay” at the BAM Playhouse (since converted into a movie theater). On the main program, I intended to situate Robert Russell Bennett’s Porgy and Bess Suite on part two. And I had engaged the Morgan State University chorus to participate in that, and also to open the second half with a cappella spirituals. Part one was a blank slate upon which Gunther inscribed Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha Overture, James P. Johnson’s Yamekraw (as reconstructed by Gunther Schuller), and William Grant Still’s Sunday Symphony (in Gunther’s opinion, the strongest of Still’s five symphonies, all of which he had perused).

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For the Interplay I had engaged Steve Mayer to do an Art Tatum set and needed a second act. Gunther chose to disassemble Duke Ellington’s Reminiscing in Tempo and put it back together again. He arrived with a set of parts, a set of excerpts, and did precisely that. His program note read in part:

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Reminiscing is one of the most successful of Ellington’s extended works, not only for its time but even as measured retrospectively against his numerous other major creative efforts through the years. Reminiscing was innovative not only in its duration – some thirteen-minutes stretched across four 10-inch sides – but in the way its several themes and episodes were integrated in to a single unified whole. Nothing quite that challenging had ever been attempted in jazz composition – and with a jazz orchestra.

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The weekend’s other participants included the music historian Carol Oja and the literary historian Robert O’Meally (on the Harlem Renaissance). It linked to a conference at Brooklyn College. I dedicated it all to Gunther’s “Seventieth Birthday Season” and we had a birthday party with a proper cake. I mention all this because nothing comparable seems remotely conceivable today – I enjoyed a BAM audience that was ready and willing. Also, because I felt it was the least I could do to honor Gunther.

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Nine years later, in 2004, Bob Freeman invited me to curate a Dvorak/America festival at the University of Texas’s Butler School of Music. This was a considerable undertaking, lasting fifteen days and including major scholars. The centerpiece was to be an orchestral program beginning with George Chadwick’s terrific Jubilee (1895), which has always sounded to me like his version of Dvorak’s Carnival Overture (and Chadwick was unquestionably influenced by Dvorak). A faculty cellist would do the Dvorak concerto. The third work – the main event – would be Frederic Delius’s Appalachia: Variations on an Old Slave Song (1896-1903): a fascinating 40-minute New World symphony for orchestra, baritone and chorus, with a “slave song” composed by Delius himself.  But the conductor of the Butler School orchestra wished to replace the Delius with Debussy’s La Mer – a suggestion that a wag in Freeman’s office dubbed “Dvorak at Sea.” Miraculously, the conductor resigned – and Bob and I needed a quick replacement. It was agreed that I would contact Gunther.

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I was in the midst of explaining all of this to Gunther, over the phone, when I got to the part about Appalachia and the Butler conductor’s refusal to conduct it. Gunther interrupted:

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“WHAT AN IDIOT!!!”

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– and proceeded to inform me that all his life he had wanted to conduct Appalachia, that he regarded Delius and Scriabin as the two composers who had most ingeniously devised a post-Wagnerian chromatic tonal language of their own.

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We added to the program “Lasst mich allein” – the Dvorak song cited in the Cello Concerto, where it ultimately bids farewell to Dvorak’s beloved sister-in-law Josefina.  There were two performances, the second being a run-out at the Round Top Festival. At the Austin performance I happened to be sitting directly behind the late Richard Crawford, then the central historian of the American musical experience. Richard had never before heard a live performance of Jubilee. He listened, beginning to end, literally on the edge of his seat. And Gunther revisited this work – as Leon had the Schoenberg -- as an old friend. It was the most persuasive performance of Jubilee I will ever hear. 

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Not long after I returned to New York City, I received in the mail a bulging envelope from Gunther. It contained a handwritten letter eight pages long, plus an annotated score of the Dvorak concerto. As the letter was marked CONFIDENTIAL, I feel constrained to quote it at any length. Gunther’s gist was that the “distortions” inflicted on Dvorak’s Cello Concerto by his Texas soloist were so upsetting that he felt impelled to document in full what he had endured. Here’s an excerpt:

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M. 120: first two beats very slow, following by a 1 ½ bar accel., then in mm. 122/3 even faster accelerations. . . . m. 128-131, big slow down (to about quarter note = 72, instead of Dvorak’s 116). M. 140, not pp, but a big fat f. M. 142 a big accel, m. 143 a big ritard. M. 147 I had to make a huge rit. so that his super-slow m. 148 made some kind of logical sense. M. 154-5 a huge accel. (the cellos and basses never could catch up with me and him).

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There was also a P.S.: “Not any other cellists pay much attention to Dvorak’s score and meticulous notation. I think it was Rostropovich who first led everyone down the primrose path.”

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I most recently had occasion to remember Gunther when I accompanied the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, and its terrific conductor Ken Kiesler, to South Africa. Recounting this experience in The American Scholar, I wrote in part:

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In 1979, the composer-pedagogue Gunther Schuller . . . delivered a rather famous lecture at the Tanglewood Music Center. He warned the students, most of them fledgling symphonic musicians, that American orchestras had fallen prey to apathy, cynicism, and bitterness. He said boredom was rife in the ranks of the most affluent, most prestigious orchestras. He complained of a “union mentality” and “absentee” music directors. The University of Michigan players I observed in South Africa comprised one of the least jaded orchestras I have encountered in years. They retained attention even when they were not playing. They drew mounting energy from the audiences in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Soweto, and Cape Town. I heard one violinist, at Soweto, impulsively declare that she did not want to return to the United States, that the concert had been “life-changing.”

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The emotion behind Gunther’s “rather famous Tanglewood lecture” can only be adequately appreciated if one happens to listen to broadcasts of Mitropoulos’s New York Philharmonic, in which Gunther subbed. [1] The intensity of commitment isn’t just a function of podium leadership. It evinces a tireless passion for music.

 

Gunther loved the Dvorak Cello Concerto so much that he literally had to expel the memory of that Texas performance.

 

1. To sample Mitropoulos’s Philharmonic at full throttle, try their January 29, 1950, broadcast of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances – and ask yourself when you last heard a professional American orchestra play with such abandon.

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