Gunther Schuller Quotes

• You know, I’m not gonna take my money with me to heaven or hell, wherever I’m going. So I want to do something good with it even though my means are very limited. I’m no millionaire!

  Gunther Schuller

• Well, because music is my life and music is not work for me.

  Gunther Schuller

• The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!

  Gunther Schuller

• That was more or less coincidental in the sense that my parents wanted me to come back to New York because that’s the center of musical activity still to this day, more or less, and so I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera.

  Gunther Schuller

• So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of the past building something new: that is what is important.

  Gunther Schuller

• So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary.

  Gunther Schuller

• I would like to read some books: I don’t have time; I would like to continue working on my autobiography.

  Gunther Schuller

• I don’t hate work, composing is not work for me, it’s my pleasure; it’s my life. So why should I stop? If something is pleasurable and exciting and rewarding, why should one stop?

  Gunther Schuller

• But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose.

  Gunther Schuller

• As rich as Cincinnati was in live music, New York was even more.

  Gunther Schuller

• As long as I’m healthy and can keep going that’s what I’ll do.

  Gunther Schuller

• And it is this sense that some of us have to contribute to the culture, to the society in ways that may hurt financially, so what? We do it because we are born to do it, we feel we have no other choice and so be it.

  Gunther Schuller

• After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

  Gunther Schuller

Gunther Schuller (13)

Birth:	22nd November, 1925
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Author, Composer, Historian, Music Conductor, Musician

About

The son of a violinist with the New York Philharmonic, he studied at the Saint Thomas Choir School and became an accomplished horn player and flute player. At age 15 he played horn professionally with the American Ballet Theatre followed by an appointment as principal hornist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and then the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York, where he stayed until 1959. During his youth, he attended the Precollege Division at the Manhattan School of Music. He began his career in jazz by recording as a french horn player with Miles Davis.

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Today's Anniversary - 22nd January

Births

• 1907 - Dixie Dean
• 1962 - Melissa Bean
• 1909 - U Thant
• 1935 - Pierre S du Pont IV
• 1960 - Michael Hutchence

Deaths

• 1968 - Duke Kahanamoku
• 2003 - Marvin Bower
• 1901 - Queen Victoria
• 2007 - Abbe Pierre
• 1995 - Rose Kennedy