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It was only more than 50 years after his death in the Wülzburg concentration camp that Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff began to be recognized. One of many composers whose works the Nazi regime labeled as Entartete Musik (degenerate music), he was effectively silenced by the stark political and social workings of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. Schulhoff was indeed possessed of radical ideas, both political and musical, and was a founding member of the Dresden-based Werkstatt der Zeit (Workshop of the Time), but he is now known to be a composer of remarkable variety and invention whose works spanned the aesthetic void between the late romanticism of Max Reger and Scriabin and the experimental modernism of John Cage. During the 30 years of his active career he wrote sonatas, quartets, sextets, jazz piano pieces, stage music, an opera, eight symphonies, and at least one oratorio.

Schulhoff's works divide roughly into four periods that manifest wildly different stylistic and ideological principles. His early works, composed after his studies at the Prague Conservatory, betray a great debt to Reger, Dvorák, and Brahms, and are in a generally serious vein. Following his service in World War I, he found new resonance in the ideas of the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils), but soon embraced the emerging trend of dadaism as more representative of his philosophies. This "second period" in his creative development shows a dual allegiance to these two schools of thought, resulting in rather austere serial works -- such as the 10 Pieces for Piano, Op. 30 (1919) -- as well as more vigorously anti-establishment works that included experimental notation systems and an emerging sense of musical humor, such as the Fünf Pittoresken, Op. 31, of the same year. By 1923 Schulhoff moved into yet a third creative phase that was partly inspired by his exposure (in Dresden via recordings owned by the painter George Grosz) to American jazz. This new influence was incorporated into a maturing synthesis of European trends, combined with a renewed interest in the music of his native Czechoslovakia, influenced by Janácek. The Five Pieces for String Quartet (1923) demonstrate this amalgamation of elements and the set has become one of his most often recorded works. During this time many of his works took on a straightforward, almost Neo-classical sound that left the complexity of serialism behind. Schulhoff's final creative phase began just before a visit to the Soviet Union in 1933 and his resulting political conversion to Stalinism. The year before, he had written a cantata based on Marx and Engels' manifesto. His late works betray a concerted effort to communicate in plain, unpretentious ways and to glorify the ideals of communism through the use of greatly simplified musical means. Ultimately these cannot be judged his most successful experiments. The German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 resulted in Schulhoff's arrest and imprisonment in 1941. He died only months later of tuberculosis. ~ Peter Bates, Patsy Morita

Gunther Schuller was probably the greatest friend jazz ever had from the classical world. A jazz devotee from the beginning, he was the most outspoken advocate of a fusion between elements of European classical music and jazz, inventing the term "third stream" at a 1957 Brandeis University lecture to describe it. Although third stream music had been around in some form since the beginning of the century, it was Schuller who crystallized the idea, and thanks to alliances with such jazz figures as John Lewis, George Russell, Charles Mingus, and Jimmy Giuffre, he actively encouraged new works in that form. Schuller's own compositions often include jazz elements, though usually far more abstractly integrated into his own 12-tone music than the works of the jazz musicians he has encouraged. As a conductor, Schuller inadvertently helped touch off a popular ragtime fad in the '70s with his spirited performances of Scott Joplin, and he participated in some key jazz recordings as a French horn player. He also was a tireless mover and shaker for jazz studies programs in universities, which had a profound and controversial effect on the direction of the music in the last third of the 20th century and beyond.

Ironically, in view of his efforts to bring jazz into academia and the concert hall, Schuller was entirely self-taught as a composer. As befitting the son of a violinist with the New York Philharmonic, he did study theory, flute, and French horn privately, but his progress on the latter was so swift that he began playing professionally with the American Ballet Theatre in 1943, and held down first-desk positions with the Cincinnati Symphony (1943-1945) and the Metropolitan Opera (1945-1959). He first attracted notice on the jazz side of the fence by playing French horn on four tracks of Miles Davis' seminal Birth of the Cool sessions in 1950, also appearing in Gil Evans' orchestra on Miles' Porgy and Bess. As his enthusiasm for mergers of both of his worlds grew during the '50s, Schuller founded the Jazz and Classical Music Society with John Lewis in 1955, which presented concerts of music written by both classical and jazz composers. One of the outcroppings from this society was a Columbia recording, Music for Brass, which contained various compositions by Schuller, Lewis, Giuffre, and J.J. Johnson as performed by musicians from across the spectrum like Miles Davis, Schuller himself, and New York Philharmonic conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos.

In conjunction with his famous Brandeis lecture, Schuller started a jazz festival there in 1957, commissioning works from Russell, Mingus, and Giuffre. He continued to turn out third Stream compositions like "Transformation" (1957), "Concertino for Jazz Quartet and Orchestra" (1959), "Conversations for the Double Quartet of the Modern Jazz Quartet and Beaux Arts String Quartet" (heard on the MJQ's Third Stream album), and "Variants on a Theme of Thelonious Monk" (1960). He and Lewis founded the Lenox School of Jazz Summer School and presented the first jazz concert ever held at Lenox's hitherto solidly classical bastion, Tanglewood, in 1963.

Having given up the French horn in 1962, Schuller merely narrowed his multi-pronged activities down to conducting, composing, teaching, and writing. The year 1967 found Schuller becoming the president of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he promptly established a jazz department that became the first to offer a four-year B.A. degree in jazz. Schuller also started the New England Conservatory Jazz Repertory Orchestra and Ragtime Ensemble, and he soon became immersed in transcribing the works of Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton, and performing period arrangements of Scott Joplin rags. The latter activity resulted in The Red Back Book (Angel), which became a runaway hit album in 1973, reawakening interest in the rags of Joplin and touching off their use in the popular movie The Sting. Schuller's involvement in the ragtime revival reached its apogee in 1975, when he conducted the first recording of Joplin's opera Treemonisha (Deutsche Grammophon) with the Houston Grand Opera; and Schuller and the NEC Ragtime Ensemble would tour well into the next decade.

Schuller reconstructed, edited, and conducted the posthumous premiere of Mingus' Epitaph at Lincoln Center in 1989, while modestly not claiming to have said the last word on this huge, chaotic work. In the classical sphere, his symphonic piece Of Reminiscences and Reflections won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1994. He also found the time to write two massive, erudite tomes on jazz, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (1968) and The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930-1945 (1989), which chronicle and analyze the music in unprecedented, thorough detail. In June 2001, Cambridge, Massachusetts institution the Longy School of Music awarded Schuller the Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society. Just weeks later, a new work by Schuller was premiered at the Rockport Chamber Music Festival. In 2009, as part of its 125th-anniversary celebration, the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered "Where the Word Ends," a new orchestral work composed by the then-83-year-old Schuller, and Schuller's autobiographical volume Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty was published two years later in 2011. Schuller died in Boston in June 2015 at 89 years of age. ~ Richard S. Ginell