Scope and Content Note
The Music in the Gunther Schuller Papers spans from 1615 to 2014, with the bulk of the materials dating from 1905 to 2010. It reflects his multifaceted work as a practicing musician—as composer, arranger, conductor, editor, French horn virtuoso, teacher, and student. The materials also reflect his other professional music endeavors, including music publisher, record company owner, arts administrator, scholar, writer, and jurist. It is important to note that Schuller prepared and copied much of his own work, taking great pride in his clean and legible hand.
The Music by Gunther Schuller subseries contains his holograph manuscripts for his own compositions, original parts, ozalids (many prepared by Schuller), and a range of printed materials, from proof copies to published editions, many with annotations. The subseries also contains more than fifty sketch notebooks and other sketch manuscripts he maintained from the 1940s through 2014.
The Music Arranged, Edited, or Transcribed by Gunther Schuller subseries represents his intensive work throughout his life as a student, arranger, performer and conductor, publisher, editor, and scholar, focusing on Western classical music, jazz, and ragtime. The works include numerous youthful endeavors, including transcriptions from recordings, radio broadcasts, and in concerts as well as his work from the 1980s and beyond on Charles Mingus’s Epitaph. Schuller’s commitment to jazz composers throughout his career is evident in this subseries as well as his leadership of the New England Ragtime Ensemble.
Contained in the Music by Others subseries is Schuller’s extensive library of scores and parts of music by other composers, not directly edited by Schuller. Many, if not most, of the materials contain extensive annotations in his hand. Some music here reflects Schuller’s work as a conductor and performing member of the horn section in various orchestras. Other materials certainly were used in the course of his self-guided early education, and still others formed the basis for his later scholarly pursuits. Predictably, jazz and popular music is plentiful. Many works are original compositions, and others highlight the contribution of arrangers.
The David Broekman Music Library subseries primarily contains manuscript full scores, vocal scores, parts, and sketches. Broekman (1899-1959) had been a member of the New York Philharmonic for a brief period in the 1920s, but spent much of career working in radio, film, and television. At some point after Broekman’s death, Schuller acquired this group of manuscripts from his widow.