Gunther Schuller Quotes

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!

Well, because music is my life and music is not work for me.

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!

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.

So this anchoring in some way, in some important way in the past without repeating the past, but on the basis of the past building something new: that is what is important.

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.