Gunther Schuller Quotations

You know, I'm not gonna take my money with me to heaven or hell, wherever I'm going. So I want to do something good with it even though my means are very limited. I'm no millionaire!

That was more or less coincidental in the sense that my parents wanted me to come back to New York because that's the center of musical activity still to this day, more or less, and so I auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera.

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!

But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose.

I would like to read some books: I don't have time; I would like to continue working on my autobiography.

So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary.

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

I was playing in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal horn. I was there for some 15 years - one of the most exciting and great musical periods in my life.

I wanted to be an artist, but at age 11, somehow all this musical knowledge and information and love for music that I had came out, and then suddenly it was very clear that I wanted to be a musician of some sort.

I wanted to be a painter and an artist. And it's interesting that in some of my later musical works, I refer so often and associate myself with works of art.