Gunther Schuller was born in the right place (the US) and at the right time (1925) to confront the complexities and contradictions of mid-20th-century music head-on. Can you reconcile postwar modernism in both contemporary music and jazz in one all-embracing meta-music? Can you integrate the excitement and subtlety of jazz with the precision and purpose of classical music; the existential puzzles of indeterminacy with the vertiginous leaps and formal constraints of improvisation? Well, maybe sometimes, maybe never, but whatever your take on these thorny issues, you can be sure that Gunther Schuller has been there, done that and annotated the T-shirt.
In fact he has done so much, as performer, composer, writer, educator and all-round musical enabler that he can be easily overlooked, or bracketed with just one slice of his wide-ranging talents. This concert, to mark his 75th birthday, saw several ensembles put together under the aegis of the London Sinfonietta. It was a chance to join the dots and hear music from several stages and genres of his long career as a composer/arranger.
The Symphony for Brass and Percussion was a nice surprise. Composed by the self-taught Schuller before he turned 25, it shows his unmistakably American individualism. He describes how the ideas grew from playing French horn in an orchestra, and the piece was impressive for being a players' piece - though carefully crafted and structured in four movements - that explored the timbral possibilities of the brass section from the inside, in much the way that hands-on contemporaries such as Stockhausen would experiment with tape and electronics a few years later.
There were several jazz arrangements written for, and featuring, Joe Lovano (tenor sax and bass clarinet), including Crepuscule with Nellie (written by Thelonious Monk for his wife) and Duke Ellington's Prelude to a Kiss. Lament for M was Schuller's own tribute to his late wife, Marjorie. The programme also included Tre Invenzione (1972), the kind of brittle, late-modernist score the Sinfonietta can do in their sleep, but the most effective pieces dated from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Night Music, Transformation and Densities 1 were superb works for medium-sized ensembles that integrated jazz and "serious" performance gestures in an elegant and unforced way, swinging (where appropriate) without dropping a note. Even when extensively notated, there was room for the distinctive timbres of jazz players such as Guy Barker, Chris Laurence, Anthony Kerr and Edwin Schuller (the composer's son) to emerge from, and merge with, the ensemble sound.
The setting for the concert - an overlit "straight" presentation with long gaps between numbers while the stage was re-arranged - was dry and disappointing. You longed for the pace and atmosphere that Schuller achieves so naturally in a piece such as Headin' Out, Movin' In (1994) to be applied to the evening's celebration. It is heartening that there are many fine musicians prepared to tackle such challenges. Whenever the qualities of jazz and contemporary music are integrated without compromise and with Gunther Schuller is one of the pioneers we can thank. Many happy returns!
