American composer Gunther Schuller (1925-2015) took the Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) as his inspirational source for his 1959 orchestral work 7 Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. The seven works he chose were created between 1912 and 1933 and capture a wide range of Klee’s artistic output in painting and drawing. The work was one of Schuller’s most popular pieces and was an example of Schuller’s ‘Third Stream’ movement pieces that fused jazz and classical music, as well as showcasing his interest in the arts.

Gunther Schuller was a brilliant polymath: a virtuoso horn player, a visionary administrator, a celebrated conductor, an author, an influential teacher, and a gifted, self-taught composer. His career began as a choirboy at St. Thomas Church Choir School in New York, where he also began lessons on the French horn. By 1943, he was appointed principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at the age of eighteen. He then joined the horn section of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, where he remained until 1959. Schuller taught composition at the Manhattan School and at Yale University before joining the New England Conservatory; he was president of that institution from 1967 to 1977.

Schuller taught composition at the Berkshire Music Center from 1963 to 1984. Much honored for his music as well as for his championship of American composers, Schuller earned a Grammy in 1974 for a recording of Scott Joplin’s music. He received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award in 1991, and he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1994.

It was poignant that he passed away on Father’s Day 2015. The vastness of his contributions to American classical and jazz music in all its various forms is—without exaggeration—staggering. It is a legacy that the United States and indeed the world will continue to celebrate, study, reflect upon, and admire for generations.

This performance will also feature Modest Mousorgsky, arr. Maurice Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition. Ravel's orchestral imagination melds magically with Mussorgsky’s responses to his friend Victor Hartmann’s images in a performance you will not want to miss!