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

Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style.

— Gunther Schuller

If you mess around with jazz, you better have a good drummer and a good bass player.

— 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

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

— Gunther Schuller

My primary calling, I always knew since the age of 11, was as a composer, and so that had to take priority.

— Gunther Schuller

But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became…

— Gunther Schuller

I wanted to be an artist, but at age 11, somehow all this musical knowledge and information and love for music that…

— Gunther Schuller

Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you…

— Gunther Schuller

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were…

— 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…

— Gunther Schuller

You know, I'm not gonna take my money with me to heaven or hell, wherever I'm going. So I want to 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…

— Gunther Schuller

I was playing in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal horn. I was there for some 15 years - one of the…

— Gunther Schuller

So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things…

— Gunther Schuller

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their…

— Gunther Schuller

My whole childhood was filled with classical music and going to concerts of the New York Philharmonic and other New York ensembles…

— Gunther Schuller

His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering…

— Gunther Schuller

If we could ever find that moment, maybe thousands of years from now, where all the musics of the worlds would be…

— Gunther Schuller

I wanted to be a painter and an artist. And it's interesting that in some of my later musical works, I refer…

— 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…

— Gunther Schuller

Many people think of me as a modernist, as a radical in music, you know, someone who's always sort of at the…

— Gunther Schuller

So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of…

— Gunther Schuller