Gunther Schuller:

Remembering the Compleat Conducting Pedagogue

(Part One)

By George Mathew 

​(Copyright by P. George Mathew, 2025. All rights reserved.)

​

​Singapore-born, Indian-American conductor, George Mathew, founder and Artistic Director of the international non-profit, Music for Life International, has emerged as a force in the classical music world, bringing symphonic music to focus on global humanitarian issues and crises at the beginning of the 21st Century. He studied conducting with Gunther Schuller, Lawrence Leighton Smith, Sir Colin Davis, Zdenek Macal and Kenneth Kiesler.

More at https://music4lifeinternational.org/georgemathew/

​

Much has been written and spoken about Gunther Schuller’s vast output of work as a composer, conductor, French horn virtuoso both in classical music and jazz, educator, conservatory president, author, publisher, recording producer and executive, and about his innovations in genre expansion with the creation of the Jazz and Third Stream departments at the New England Conservatory (NEC) during his tenure as President. But relatively little has been said or written about his remarkably evolved and substantial work as a conducting pedagogue, and indeed his philosophy and approach to the craft of conducting.

​

This article will introduce Gunther Schuller’s approach to conducting pedagogy in the following framework outlined by Mr. Schuller himself in various places: his book The Compleat Conductor,[1] his various conducting seminars at Tanglewood, which he co-taught with distinguished colleagues like Leonard Bernstein, Erich Leinsdorf, Seiji Ozawa and Gustav Meier, his conducting seminars at the Festival at Sandpoint that he led from 1985 to 1998, and numerous seminars and workshops at various festivals, conservatories and universities around the US and abroad.

 

Schuller’s famous primary (the word “primal” perhaps describes it better) demand from conductors and, for that matter, from all performers was “scrupulous faithfulness” to the score. But he was always quick to point out and expand on the idea that “dull” adherence to the information on the page was antithetical to the good and indeed effective realization of the music’s content and the composer’s intent. The idea, he maintained, is not to cow the enthusiastic performer or conductor; the idea is that the text of the score is the only starting point of interpretational consideration.

​

In Schuller’s view, the education of the conductor must focus on at least the following three elements:

1. Absolute fidelity to the text and spirit of the score, composer’s intent and context, in particular tempo, dynamics and balance, rhythm and articulation, structure and stylistic context,[2] the governing principle being “if the composer wrote it, it needs to be heard.”

2. A Conducting Practice and rehearsal methodology which seeks to provide the ideal environment for the musicians to do their work effectively, without anxiety, fear or obstruction, and to provide the right kind of stimulation through gesture and temperament.

3.  The acquisition of the musical, intellectual, socio-psychological skills, knowledge, and the physical conducting technique to effectively fulfil the above elements 1 and 2.

 

To this end Schuller outlined a number of prerequisites.

i. Humility. Most conductors, especially the young and inexperienced, should start with the notion that they are not the equal of the great master composers – especially the 75 to 100 composers whom we find in the general canon of orchestral, operatic and choral repertory. Therefore one ought to assume that the scores and directions we find in the scores are a non-negotiable starting point to any and all performing choices the conductor might make.

ii. Curiosity. An insatiable curiosity about the composer, his/her cultural and compositional context, performance practice, and the history of the reception conventions that may have interacted with the text between the composer’s time and our own. This curiosity is an absolute requirement to see what the composer might have meant especially when the realization of the text strays into the region of what is conventionally held to be “impossible or impractical.”

iii. A well-trained and discerning musical ear. In fact, Schuller specified seven kinds of hearing [3] –

a. Pitch and Interval hearing

b. Harmony

c. Dynamics and the ability to shape crescendi and diminuendi

d. Timbre and sound

e. Orchestrational contours and balance

f.  Rhythm and articulation

g. Line and continuity (I have heard him call this “structural hearing and pacing.”)

​​

To these I would add an “eighth category of hearing” – the ability to simultaneously keep in aural focus, a detailed sound image generated from the score, and to monitor the actual sound image coming from the ensemble. The two sound images are usually a split second apart because the actual sound is ideally a result of the ensemble’s response to the conductor’s gestures, all while modifying one’s gestures in order to get the actual sound to match the image in the conductor’s ear. Schuller spoke and wrote about this skill often and sympathetically. He also reminded us frequently about the attendant need to keep a cool head to accomplish these varied tasks of aural observation, evaluation and adjustment.

​

Notably a substantial ego, charisma and dominant or domineering personality was not a prerequisite that Schuller considered essential, though he admired conductors like Carlos Kleiber and Dimitri Mitropoulos who were profoundly charismatic. I suspect that he quietly considered a charismatic personality something of a liability where faithfully realizing the content and intent of a score were concerned. That said, he often reminded us of the distinction between a domineering ego and the necessity for a conductor to have complete conviction in the decisions made in order to realize the spirit of the music and the intent of the composer.

 

The most exhaustive utterances anywhere of Schuller’s conducting philosophy are to be found in the first two chapters of his 1997 book, The Compleat Conductor, which are, not coincidentally, entitled A PHILOSOPHY OF CONDUCTING and A HISTORY OF CONDUCTING. They should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand his concerns and context about conducting and the macro- and micro-pathologies that have crept into the craft and the profession, which he sought to address and alleviate almost all his adult life.

​

By way of historical preface, it might be useful to remember that Mr. Schuller began his musical studies as a boy soprano chorister in the New York City choir school of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Fifth Avenue, in the years 1937-1940 and was exposed to the highest performance standards as a child singer by T. Tertius Noble, the distinguished Organist and Choirmaster of the St. Thomas Choir. While still in high school, Schuller became a professional French hornist, first with the fledgling American Ballet Theatre Orchestra under Antal Doráti, then as principal horn with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and finally, still before the age of 20, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. During this period, he played French horn as a freelancer with ensembles like the New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Toscanini’s NBC Symphony and numerous others. He was, as a result, exposed to the very highest standards of orchestral performance and conducting too. Indeed, he was quite fond in his later years of saying that his two greatest teachers (where conducting and indeed, orchestral music were concerned) were first, the vast body of the great classics of the orchestral and operatic literature and second, the physical experience of the actual orchestral sound itself, sitting deep within the belly of the beast in the horn section, embedded between the various choirs of orchestral sound – the strings, the winds, brass and percussion and of course some of the greatest operatic voices of the 20th Century drifting down from the stage at the old MET opera. And of course, all these extraordinary musical experiences were had under the baton of the greatest conductors of the era – Dimitri Mitropoulos, Arturo Toscanini, Fritz Reiner, Eugene Goossens, Antal Doráti, Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski and so many others of that period. These experiences, no doubt, led him to stress constantly, the importance of engaging the ensemble (and especially individual musicians) with empathy to facilitate a healthy, positive and efficient working environment for the musicians who already have a remarkably difficult task at hand to realize the music accurately, and with the right spirit. Schuller often reminisced about the physical difficulties of playing with conductors who (sometimes malevolently) generated fear, tension and ultimately musical “un-ease” for the musicians which adversely affected the spirit of the music even when the ensemble and finish of the performance was “beautiful,” clean, together or even structurally and semantically correct. The classroom would also frequently resound with his memories of the great benevolent conductors for whom he had played – artists like Mitropoulos, Goossens, Sir Thomas Beecham, Pierre Monteux and Max Rudolf, who were gentle, kind, modest and generous but no less compelling in their conviction about their understanding and interpretive decisions to realize the composers’ intentions.

​

It was during this early period of some 18 years as a professional orchestral hornist, while, studying the scores of the works he was playing, that Schuller discovered that there were often significant and sometimes seemingly arbitrary deviations from the letter of the score in the decisions, and interpretative choices made by the “great” conductors. And thus began his decades of study of the craft of conducting and particularly, the art of interpretation or “realization”— a term used by Maurice Ravel — which Schuller came to prefer over “interpretation.” As the years went by Schuller’s concerns with the state of conducting and conducting pedagogy also intensified. His quoted axioms in the appendix below betray the fact that he had long grown impatient with the “fraternity” of conducting teachers who had not yet exercised the science and mathematics of their craft, who had not yet brought the discipline and methodology of a Nadia Boulanger, Ivan Galamian, a Carl Flesch, an Artur Schnabel, a Robert Mann or a Marcel Tabuteau to their conducting pedagogy. [4]

 

Over the years, like many theorists and teachers, Schuller identified the elements of music that needed to be mastered by any musician but especially by performers, composers and conductors. He would later come to systematize these in his pursuit of the ideal he called “The Complete Musician”[5] – an ideal which he would expand to include fluency in multiple musics, composition, and a variety of disciplines including improvisation. An early iteration of these skills can be seen in the wheel of

fundamental constituent musical elements of technique that he drew for a lecture at

Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (see Fig.1: The Wheel of Technique). [6] 

​​​

The wheel in this figure represents the wholeness of musicianship and the spokes

are the elements, which are transcribed below:

Rhythm                                                                     Articulation                                                                         

Pitch                                                                         Follow conductor or ensemble

Intonation                                                                Read (all info)

Harmony/intervals (dissonances and                    Attack

consonances)                                                          Release

Dynamics (absolute/relative)                                 Phrasing

Timbre (absolute/relative)                                     Structural Function

Register (but also with whom)                               Vibrato (straight or flowing)                                                  Figure 1

​

I came to study conducting with Gunther Schuller in the summer of 1995 at the Festival of Sandpoint, the summer music academy he had founded some ten years earlier after his departure from the Tanglewood Music Center. My own search for a conducting teacher began in my early 20s and led me to a number of different teachers including some of Schuller’s own students. A profound dissatisfaction with the disorganized, largely improvised nature of conducting pedagogy is what eventually led me to Gunther Schuller. I knew from the grapevine, of course, that as a conductor he had a ferociously acute ear and was a stringent and demanding musician and conductor himself. But I knew little of him at the time, as a conducting pedagogue except that he was formidable in his demands for correctness and absolute fidelity to the score. I remained his student for four years and his personal, artistic and executive assistant for two of those. And more than a decade later, when I shared with him that my own international humanitarian work with Music For Life International,[7] with classical music as its engine, was deeply grounded in his hermeneutic principles of musical and textual primacy, I was very moved to hear him say, “Well, I have always considered you a true disciple.”

​

Mr. Schuller’s conducting teaching took place in three primary formats –

• Lecture-discussions where he went through either a topic or a piece or category of repertoire and dispensed advice relating to performance or study. These sessions would often be extremely specific regarding particular spots or issues in individual pieces like dynamics and balances in Brahms Symphonies or hypermeter in Beethoven or Schumann symphonies. These classroom discussions were more often than not, peppered with detailed anecdotes from his own vast experience, and even sometimes what not to do. There would always be some sessions focused on the detailed and accurate analysis and realization of the scores – tempo, metric and rhythmic issues, dynamics, balances, performance practice and related concerns; the dangers of bringing out or highlighting “details” while ignoring other elements, etc. Sometimes he would focus on a single work like the Rite of Spring or Daphnis et Chloé. In these sessions he would outline what he considered adequate internalization of the written text, as well as what understanding the context of the music required – the composer’s other works, other contemporary works of the time, contemporary literature, art, history, politics, philosophy, religion, science and music theory. He liked to say that “every fly-speck” on the page had to be examined, understood, not just absorbed; one needs to know the raison d’être, the “why” of every morsel of information. A classic example, might be something like the hypermeter in the First Movement of Beethoven’s 5th. The entire movement is structured in periods of 4 measures (occasionally extended to 6 measures). There are two places where the period is 5 measures long. Why? It is not enough to know that there are two 5-bar periods, or what the second clarinet might be playing in the proverbial m.356 of any particular work. One must know why. To support our wider, background education, Mr. Schuller would give us bibliographies of essential reading for all conductors (all from memory without notes) – including but not restricted to the great conducting and orchestration treatises of Johann Mattheson, Carl Junker,[8] Leopold Mozart, Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Felix Weingartner, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Richard Strauss, Eric Leinsdorf, Hermann Scherchen and many more. He could quote liberally from treatises ranging from Mattheson and Junker in the early 18th century to Wagner, Weingartner and Max Rudolf to illustrate and argue technical points of beat-patterns, performance practice or rehearsal technique. I have included below a summary of his ‘fingertip bibliography’ for a conducting education.

​

• Practical conducting classroom sessions where he coached/taught individual conductors, conducting a single pianist – usually the prodigiously gifted conductor/pianist/composer, the late Stefan Kosinski reproducing the orchestral scores in instant two-hand reductions while playing from full scores. Mr. Kosinski was an unusually voluble and expressive (verbally as well as pianistically) presence at the piano offering frequent insights, encouragement and the occasional dissent to the larger discourse guided by Mr. Schuller. In these sessions, Mr. Schuller’s focus was on his main areas of concern in conducting. These included –

a. Tempo, Meter and Rhythm – He was supremely concerned with following all the tempo instructions, written and implied by the       composer with exquisite, doting care in all their manifestations – verbal tempo directions, metronome indications when provided, steady vs. inflected tempo, metric modulation, hypermeter, tempo relationships and their implications for structural/formal hierarchies, and in the personal lexicons and styles of each composer and era.​

b. Dynamics – The scaling of dynamics within different historical periods and the personal dynamic signature of each composer (including various periods of output), the nature and pacing of crescendo and diminuendo in different contexts, the variety and quality of accents, sforzati, the frequently elusive connection between textural and orchestrational balances,  and especially the important links between bow discipline [9] and dynamics were all vitally essential to him as markers of mood, character and indeed, of structure and form.

c. Structural articulation and musical architecture – Mr. Schuller frequently warned about the dangers of arbitrary and automatic tempo inflections to highlight structural contours (e.g. the use of gratuitous ritardandi before structural downbeat moments). That said, he was, at the same time, a great believer and evangelist of Beethoven’s notion of subtle tempo flexibility or Tempo des Gefühls where context requires the subtle, sensitive and judicious use of such flexibility. A favorite example that came up often was the return of the famous chorale in the Finale of Brahms’ First Symphony, which many conductors precede with a significant rit. (not indicated by Brahms). In his own famous recording of Brahms 1st Symphony [10] (made with a distinguished, handpicked orchestra to illustrate his philosophy of conducting) he even presses the point a little by not only making no rit., but by driving hard into the reprise of the chorale with a hint of accelerando!

d. Actual conducting technique. Mr. Schuller’s own conducting technique was thoroughly unflashy and was always dedicated to the principle of producing the maximum clarification of musical intent with the least amount of physical effort, movement and ostentation. As much as he demanded fidelity to the text and spirit of the music, he was not an advocate of physically miming the music at the cost of the rhythmic and metric clarity critical to facilitating a useful environment for the players/singers. He laid great stock in the integrity of beat patterns because he was profoundly aware of the evolution of the beat patterns and the beauty of their graphic and musical function. He felt very strongly that there are reasons why a three-beat or four-beat pattern has evolved the way it has and that it tells the story of an evolving hierarchy in the strength of the individual beats. To abandon a beat pattern gratuitously is to lose contact with the physical and rhythmic specific gravity of that historical process. He always spoke of developing a kind of “third eye” and “third ear” which conductors always need to focus on themselves so they can always monitor what it is that they are doing manually and the effect that it is having on the music and the ensemble.

​

• Podium teaching with orchestra. At Sandpoint, the three weeks of the conducting course always ended with the advanced conductors (Fellows) leading a varied public concert at the festival mainstage with the Spokane Symphony Orchestra, sometimes with Mr. Schuller sharing the program with them. The 3 or 4 rehearsals for these concerts were real laboratory sessions where the Fellows were given the opportunity to put into practice the discussions, concepts and insights gleaned from the previous weeks with their teacher in the classroom. Mr. Schuller was very much present during these rehearsals, usually letting the conductor do the rehearsing but intervening, sometimes frequently, if he felt the necessity. These interventions would almost always be in the realm of the technical, physical aspects of the conducting or of advising a different verbal or rehearsal method to get the results that the student conductor might be seeking. I recall a number of occasions when some serious physical intervention was involved. A student conductor, using habitual and patterned gestures that were too large was slowing down the orchestra and obscuring the precision of the ensemble. After repeated entreaties to reduce the size of the beat, which the conductor failed to incorporate (not because he was willfully ignoring the instruction but because the large gestures had become unconsciously patterned) Mr. Schuller got up on the rostrum behind the conductor and put his arms around him and physically restrained all motion except below the elbows and wrists. The conductor was shocked and the orchestra amused. But the ensemble tightened up almost immediately and afterwards Mr. Schuller observed to us in the post rehearsal post-mortem that it is really difficult to break physical patterning and that he wanted to shock the conductor out of the habitual movement which had been built over months or years, and that with music that is motoric and has a “groove,” it is best not to disturb the groove unless it has been set at a tempo far away from the composer’s prescription. I remember a similar moment when on the Spokane Symphony podium myself. I had been reprimanded for moving around (“walking around” on the podium) on the platform and thus not keeping my beat reliably in the same place in the peripheral vision field of the musicians (who really do need to see the conductor when they periodically glance up to check in). After the third or fourth occasion when I took a step or two away or toward the music stand, Mr. Schuller walked up to me and planted one of his very substantial feet on both mine, with some weight too, so that I could not move and indeed, I could feel the resistance when I still tried from habit to move. I still feel the weight of his foot today sometimes when I reflexively begin to pace while conducting. He was that rare conducting teacher who deeply understood the power of habit and the intensity of experience required to break some of these deeply ingrained, unconscious habitual patterns.

​

Typically, the three weeks of the Sandpoint conducting seminar consisted of a deep dive into half a dozen of the central works of the standard repertoire. Mr. Schuller had a variety of insights and advice when it came to the central pillars of the symphonic repertoire. He employed a number of canonic works to use as exemplars of pedagogical approaches (often pedagogical approaches actually tailored and defined by the nature and content of the works themselves, rather than generic).  In the three years that I attended the festival and conducting course, the repertoire overlapped almost completely with the pieces that he examines in his book, The Compleat Conductor (6 of the works* in the book appear in the list below) –

 

Beethoven: Symphonies 5*, 7* and 8 and Egmont Overture

 

Brahms: Symphonies 1*, 2 and 4*

 

Mozart: Overtures to Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte

 

Mozart: Symphonies in g minor No. 25, “little g minor,” and No. 40

 

Schubert: Rosamunde Overture

 

Mendelssohn: Fingal’s Cave and Die schöne Melusine Overtures

 

Schumann: Symphony No. 2*

 

Ravel: Daphnis and Chloé, Second Suite*

 

Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini

 

Bartok: Romanian Dances

 

Stravinsky: Sacre du Printemps

​

Mr. Schuller’s conducting seminars always began with a session or two where each student conducted for a few minutes a short passage of his/her own choice, ostensibly to see where the conductor was in his/her internalization of the music, musical understanding of the text and manual, technical skill. These sessions were always conducted with piano. It seemed that these conducting acquaintance “interviews” often served to shake the student out of their particular, patterned physicality of conducting and also of their emotional and psychological comfort zone. My memory of that summer, now thirty years ago, is that nearly all the students in this preliminary session sought, in some fashion, to impress him with their skill or persona or flair on the podium and almost without exception they came a cropper in this effort usually stumbling over one or more of his basic tenets such as dynamics or tempo, or a discrepancy between the actual conducting and the conductor’s intent, eg. a). upbeats being in a different tempo from the ensuing tempo, b). dynamics being ignored or c). contradictory physical gestures for dynamics – big or energetic gestures while demanding a piano or pianissimo. Once everyone had conducted a little in this get-acquainted round, Mr. Schuller now had a basis of familiarity with the level, sensibilities and technical identity of each student conductor, and was ready to proceed further. During our classroom sessions with piano or sometimes conducting in silence, he coached each conductor minutely to reinforce the inner aural image extracted from the score. A few core doctrinal principles still stand out in my memory from across the decades.

​

Mr. Schuller recognized tempo, as did many of his fellow conducting pedagogues, as one of the cardinal pillars of musical structure. Again, his fiercely held article of faith on tempo [11] could be summed up as –

1. Follow the composer’s tempo directive in the Italian, German or other verbal instruction and of course, metronome markings when the composer used them.

2. Try on and approach the inherent difficulties posed by the composer’s instruction rather than rejecting them out of hand as “unidiomatic”, “unplayable” or worse.

3. A sensitive and nuanced tempo flexibility [12] which delivers on the changes of mood and character in the music.

4. Schuller also continually emphasized the particular personalizations of tempo by different composers – eg. Mozart’s Allegro types and all their variety and gradients.[13]

​

​

​​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​It is probably useful to make a little detour here to explore the “subroutine” of hypermeter which is a pervasive phenomenon especially in the music of Beethoven whom Schuller used as an auxiliary tutor in almost all the attendant disciplines and skills of conducting. In much of Classical and Romantic music, many composers used an architectural frame of hypermetrical blocks to build their symphonic structures especially in outer movements. These hypermetrical periods are often in groupings of 4, 3, sometimes 6 measures, with the occasional, unusual grouping of 5. Beethoven even advertises the hypermeter in places like the 2nd movement of the 9th Symphony with the rubric “Ritmo di tre battute” which then morphs into “Ritmo di quattro battute” and back again. This hypermetrical foundation with its stressed and unstressed “hyperbeats”, in Schuller’s view, is an indispensable aspect of this repertory and more often than not it is ignored by the musicians simply because it is too difficult to track the hypermeter while one is playing an individual part. Mr. Schuller suggested that the hypermeter, especially in such works as Beethoven symphonies, the Schumann 2nd Symphony, the finale of the Schumann Piano Concerto etc. be marked into the part with brackets to aid the individual player or section especially if a phrase starts somewhere other than the beginning of the hypermeasure.

​

See the examples below from Schuller’s own marked string parts for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He maintained that the entire first movement is articulated in a hypermeter of 4 measures [14] per period with the occasional extension to 6. At two critical places, there are hypermeasures of 5 written measures which mark major events in the structure of the movement – the first 5-bar hypermeasure at m.224 signals the end of the development section and triggers the recapitulation [15]. The second at m. 389 (not pictured) signals the onset of the  coda section. He meticulously marked each hypermeasure into the parts, indicating stressed and unstressed parts of the hypermeasure with the indications, ’ for stressed and ˘ for unstressed hyperbeats.

​

Fig. 2 Violin 1. Movement 1, Beethoven Symphony 5. Note the 5-bar period marked at m. 224.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig.3 Violoncello part. Movement 1, Beethoven Symphony 5, m.224.

​​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

Fig.4. Violin 1 part. Movement 3. Beethoven Symphony 5. Neither the music nor the part begins with the first beat of the hypermeasure.

​​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

Fig.5. Violoncello part. Movement 3, Beethoven Symphony 5

​​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a similar vein, when there is a fairly long crescendo or diminuendo, eg. one going from p to ff or vice-versa especially over a long number of measures, it is useful to establish the gradient of the crescendo with intermediate dynamics in the parts so as ensure a geometric or exponential curve rather than an arithmetic one. See his hand-edited gradation of the diminuendo (Figure 2) in the first violin part from m.210 to m. 222.

​

Fig.6. Arithmetic crescendo curve climaxing too early at its destination dynamic

                                                                   ff

 

 

 

                                                                   pp

​​

Fig. 7 Geometric crescendo curve climaxing correctly

                                                                   ff

 

 

​

                                                                   pp

​

Speaking of dynamics, Mr. Schuller was obsessed with the accurate rendering and proportioning of dynamics in both the conductor’s internalization of the music from the score, and how he/she proceeded to realize it with his/her own conducting and rehearsal method. The corollary elements of bow discipline, and proportion, string vibrato, the variety and execution of accents, their notation and realization, and of course, ensemble and indeed orchestral issues of texture, balance, blend, and finally the pacing and framing of crescendo and diminuendo were of cardinal importance to him. He even coined an acronym, “TMTE” (meaning Too Much Too Early) for crescendi which peak too early (see Fig. 6 and 7) and thereby become ineffective for the affect of volume and energy intended by the composer and, indeed, by the relevant historical style. To this end he always prescribed a geometric or exponential curve of cresc. or dim. rather than an arithmetic one which usually tends to arrive at its destination too soon to be effective [16].

 

In particular, the question of orchestral and ensemble balances was critically important, especially in the reading and editing (preparation) of information on the printed page to realize the composer’s intent. These could involve rewriting actual dynamics. eg. at m.15 in the first movement of Beethoven 7th Symphony, the composer writes ff down the page in every single part. Mr. Schuller constantly reiterated that the long notes in the winds should be rendered ff/mf (much like a fp), the brass, especially the trumpets should be marked ff/mp or ff/p and the violas should play their tremolando ff as ff/f. Then the main melodic theme in half notes in the second violins and the rising four octave scale in the Cb/Vc continuing into the first violins could all be heard in the appropriate hierarchy within a “balanced” impression of ff down the page, his own composer’s conscience requiring that “every note written ought to be heard.”

​

Below is a selection of Mr. Schuller’s frequent general admonitions and reminders to the student conductors both on the podium and in the classroom. There are so many unique insights in these comments/observations that I have included them largely unedited, in his own words [17]. First are morsels of general advice, caution, anecdotes and encouragement followed by observations and insights on four of the most well-known works in the general canon – Beethoven’s Symphonies 5 and 7 and Brahms’ Symphonies 1 and 4.

​

General Remarks (in Gunther Schuller’s own words)

​

• God is in the details – Mies van der Rohe.

• If you declare to the world that you are a conductor, what does that entail?

• The one absolute is KNOWING the score.

• Conducting has to be a sacrificial, almost religious calling.

• What I want to do is not to make you do what Solti or Bruno Walter did but rather to help you with what you, with your particular bodily equipment and unique personality, can do to realize your particular body manifestation of the music.

• The music pulls you into all manner of bad habits. And you must free yourself through constant observation and practice.

• If you are not in full command of the physical self, you cannot express any of what you want (regardless of whether it is right or wrong).

• We are the prisoners of our bodies. Bad habits will always creep in…

• We cannot play the music for them [the orchestra]. Don’t mime the music.

• Conductors must observe themselves too.

• You must have a clear and cool head at all times.

• Put your brain in your hands.

• What is the harmonic essence of a 20-minute movement in a Mahler or Bruckner symphony?

• There is a way of knowing why every note is there. And one must find it.

• Seek (sniff) out what is new per piece, per composer – harmonies, instrumentation, rhythm, articulation…etc.

• If you over-conduct, the ears will not hear.

• The hardest thing in conducting is to maintain the detachment necessary to hear what is happening next.

• Textual fidelity is not mechanistic, but rather a road to that highest window of interpretive freedom (where the self is transcended).

• If you conduct too high, it becomes very easy to make an unconscious accelerando or lose control altogether.

• Learn accompaniments as well as anything else.

• The greatest excitement is that which you can control.

• Every f every p must be different according to context.

• Go through a piece/movement and plot all the dynamics and then plan all of them into the conducting scheme.

• Differentiate between staccato dots and wedges/Keilen. You must know the difference between the note lengths and accents of the wedges and the staccato dots.

• You have to declare your integrity of tempo in the first few bars of a piece.

• A rounded beat invites tripletization. Duple rhythm requires a more angular, jagged beat.

• The angular and clicked beat helps toward a duple feel. The rounded beat emphasizes three-ness. Threes roll; twos have a universal marching, accented quality.

• Meter and rhythm mean nothing unless they can be felt.

• Cross rhythms must be felt by the conductor. Otherwise, they will not be felt by the orchestra and certainly not heard by the audience. eg. the overlaid 7/8 over the 6/8 grid in the Till Eulenspiegel horn call. Both the grid and the cross-rhythm must be heard.

• In the Second movement of Beethoven 7th, the rhythmic layers become a kind of rhythmic counterpoint. Consider also counterpoints of dynamics, rhythm, tempi, etc. when you study a work.

• A fermata is that which cannot be notated in any measurable way. So don’t measure them. Even the conductor must be surprised.

• Slow music must always be mentally subdivided.

• I have a rule – if there are 32nds in the music and it’s 4/4, there’s a good chance I might want to do it in 8.

• Rit.’s and Accel’s must be conceived geometrically or exponentially, not arithmetically.

• In passages of similar music, one must not approach it with a sense of “I don’t’ know what do with this because it plays itself.”

• Grace-notes are always on or before the beat. One must experiment and not automatically exclude the notion that the grace-notes could go before the beat.

• Always check for the alternatives based on the facts of the score.

• Practise the dynamic scales from ppp to fff. Otherwise you will lose it in the heat of battle.

• Every climax is better served if it is not

  • over-crescendo-ed into

  • rushed into.

• When a composer writes crescendo, just go to the next dynamic level. If the composer means more, he/she will ask for it.

• You have to know the danger points in every piece.

• The score is there to help you stay ahead of the music. This is why true memorizing can be dangerous [because one is, more often than not, concerned with remembering the musical surface that comes next when conducting from memory].

• A lot of cueing does not a great conductor make.

• Stay with the people who have the important music and don’t stare at them!

• Arthur Schuller: Please Gunther, don’t always conduct the first stand (of strings).

• Unless you look at them (the musicians) they are not going to look at you.

• We should all have a vocabulary of beat-sizes/tensile strength/viscosity for the prevailing dynamic. All of that will depend on whether the music is rhythmic, flowing, etc.

• The difference between mf and f is not the same as that between ff and fff.  The ff is only slightly less intense than fff.

• Every dynamic at the ends of a cresc. or dim. must be accounted for and preferably marked in the parts.

• Every forte, every piano must be different according to context [of the piece, the composer and the historical and geographic style]

• Remember Mozart’s f is not Beethoven’s f.

• We all want to reach out to the orchestra physically, especially in moments of intensification. The trick is to do it by means other than stretching out our arms forward.

• Create a schedule for yourselves for the seven days of the week – one for each of the seven kinds of hearing. A plan for long-range growth.

• One does not need to rehearse everything. Sergiu Comissiona used to do this. He would focus on the most tricky things and it saved enormous amounts of time and signalled an unspoken trust and respect to the musicians.

• Lenny Bernstein and I were close friends for many years. We disagreed about a lot but one of the nicest things we agreed on was that the right hand must show everything. The left hand confirms, affirms, reinforces, etc. but everything must be present in the right hand.

​

Rehearsal technique

• Don’t speak as soon as you stop. Give the orchestra time to regroup especially after turning pages to and fro.

• If you lose tempo in any one place, make sure you have a list of places where you can reclaim the tempo.

​

​Repertoire-specific comments from conducting seminars and orchestra sessions (see Part Two)​

 

​Footnotes to Part One:​

1. Gunther Schuller, The Compleat Conductor, (Oxford University Press, New York, 1997)

2. Schuller liked to tell a story of how the late Robert Mann, violinist and founder of the Juilliard String Quartet came to NEC for a lecture-demonstration in 1967. He played an excerpt from a Haydn Quartet, correctly, accurately following every detail of the score … in seven different ways!

3. Ibid.p. 17

4. In the years during and since Schuller’s activity as a conducting pedagogue, there have been a number of conducting teachers at American conservatories and universities, who have made considerable progress filling the pedagogical deficit in this regard, both with teaching methodology and publications. Hans Swarowsky who did, in fact, utilize a systematized methodology in his conducting pedagogy, before this period, was resident mostly at the Vienna State Academy of Music and Performing Arts.

5. Schuller borrowed this rubric “The Compleat Conductor” for his book on conducting from one of his idols, the Baroque composer and theorist Johann Mattheson, whose treatise Der vollkommene Capellmeister “The Complete Chapel Musicmaster” (Hamburg, 1739) was a favorite reference work.

6. From GS’s handwritten notes for a lecture at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana (June 13, 1974).

7. Music for Life International is a non-profit organization, founded by the author, creating humanitarian social impact and public diplomacy through classical music around the world. Gunther Schuller was a member of its Honorary Advisory Board from its beginnings in 2006 until his death.

8. Carl Ludwig Junker, Einige der vornehmsten Pflichten eines Capellmeisters oder Musikdirektors, (Some of the Foremost Duties of the Conductor), Winterthur, 1782.

9. This includes the history of string bowing technique and the evolving imperative for string sound to get brighter, louder and carry longer distances in ever growing concert halls. Schuller used to tell the story of how frustrated his father, Arthur Schuller, longtime Principal Second Violin of the New York Philharmonic, used to become with the lack of bow discipline among his colleagues, during the mid-century decades, in that storied ensemble.

10. Beethoven 5th and Brahms 1st Symphonies, GM Recordings 1995.

11. The Compleat Conductor, p.37

12. Mr. Schuller was fond of quoting Beethoven’s phrase, Tempo des Gefühls or Takt des Gefühls for subtle tempo inflection, which the composer felt, informed the Geist or spirit of the music.

13. The Compleat Conductor, p.43

14. Schuller always referred the students to check the sketches and the various versions of the first movement motto including the early sketch versions which are cast in 4/4 with repeated sixteenth notes rather than 2/4 with eighth notes – See The Compleat Conductor, p.113 which cross-references Heinrich Schenker’s study of the symphony.

15. The period beginning in m.249 is still a 4-measure hypermeasure simply extended by the fermata at m.252.

16. The Compleat Conductor, p.32

17. These are from my own handwritten notes (almost all verbatim) from Schuller’s classes, lectures and rehearsals between 1995 and 2001.​

​

(Please continue to Part Two of Remembering The Compleat Conductor Pegagogue)

​

​

•    •   •

​

​

​