8/23/2015

Jazz Articles: Gunther Schuller: Third Stream from the Source - By Bill Shoemaker Jazz Articles

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Gunther Schuller: Third Stream from the

Source
January/February 2001
Bill Shoemaker
For Gunther Schuller, there has never been one third stream. When Schuller coined the term in his
landmark 1957 Brandeis University lecture, he was identifying an emergent sensibility, not a set of
stylistic parameters. Beginning in the late 40s, Schuller, who now just concluded two months of
concerts, lectures and symposia celebrating his 75th birthday, realized that composers as diverse as
Ellington and Ralph Burns were already streaming. The die was already cast; there was no one
formula at work, says Schuller of his formative observations. Since the ideal for me was to create an
absolutely new concept of composition in which the jazz and classical would be so blended that you
would not be able to identify the jazz roots from the classical roots, I approached this amalgamation
process in a different way in each of my pieces.
Often, especially in a commission situation, my approach was dependent incredibly on who was
going to play the music, Schuller expands. Writing for Ornette Coleman or for John Lewis and Milt
Jackson will result in totally different pieces. When I began writing pieces for the Modern Jazz
Quartet, I was already a 12-tone composer. They were certainly not atonal improvisers. I could see
immediately that there could be a schism in the middle of the piece if I didnt do something beyond
what I was already doing and what they were already doing to make it a unified piece. In the end with
third stream, it is the creative force of who plays the music, and to what extent they can do justice to
both sides of these traditions, that the piece depends.
Schullers streaming took a pivotal turn with the arrival of Coleman and Eric Dolphy. Many of
Schullers pieces from this period stand up remarkably well against those of the new streamers. A
case in point is Abstraction, which Schuller recorded with Coleman for Atlantic in 59. What is now
astonishing about the piece is how Schullers violin parts foreshadowed the plasticity of Mat Maneris
playing. Schuller maintains that the emergence of improvisers like Coleman and Dolphy caused jazz
and classical music to cross-fertilize in significant ways, technically, conceptually and stylistically, a
process that has continued so that we have now reached the point where the borderline between what
used to be called jazz and what used to be called classical music is so blurred and so overlapping it
defies labeling. You cant say what either is anymore, using those discrete definitions.
In the meantime, since my early postulation about bringing jazz and classical music together, the
entire world of ethnic, folk and vernacular musics, of which there are several hundred thousand, some
of which represent traditions that are 5,000 years old, have come into the streaming pot, Schuller
adds. So, the third stream is now 100,000 streams. The original thirdstream concept now seems like a
trickle, the headwaters, and now third stream is like the Mississippi delta, a vast complex that has
been fed by countless tributaries. But the idea of combining the various concepts and traditions of
music is still very much at its beginnings.
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8/23/2015

Jazz Articles: Gunther Schuller: Third Stream from the Source - By Bill Shoemaker Jazz Articles

Originally published in January/February 2001

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