I am grateful for all the thought and time Gunther Schuller invested in revising the transcript of our interview, recorded at his house at Newton Centre, Massachusetts, sometime in the early 1980s.

Here is an excerpt from the composer’s letter of April 15, 1985:

“The interview is now in quite good shape, and represents my views and thoughts on your questions accurately. I had to amplify some answers a little, because as I answered them ‘live’ to you, they were not entirely clear. I have also answered your additional questions in your January 7 letter. All best wishes for your project.”

I feel that Gunther Schuller’s text is an important historical document, an eye-and ear-witness account of a pivotal phase in postwar music history. Beyond its immediate autobiographical significance, it sheds light on the way an American composer would respond to the spirit of the Darmstadt Summer Courses in the 1950s, a kind of witches’ kitchen of new music in the making. As a European, I personally find his comments on the American scene of tremendous interest. For one thing, he looks at Aaron Copland from a different angle than I who had met him in Budapest in 1973, having translated his book The New Music into Hungarian. I found him a jovial and friendly old man; nothing hinted at the dictator he appears to have been considered by some people back home.

While American composers had no ready access to scores of the Second Viennese School because of historical circumstances, their Hungarian counterparts were deprived of them for ideological reasons (which were of course also rooted in history: the division of the world after 1945), whereas in Austria after the Anschluss, ideological considerations of a different color banished Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils from public musical consciousness (see the interview with Gerhard Wimberger).

With regard to the plates of the scores of the twelve-tone composers that Schuller mentions: they were not hidden by Universal Edition during the war, since the publisher had been taken over by the Nazis who installed one Johannes Petschull as its director. It was Alfred Schlee (1901–98) who buried the plates in his garden, thereby saving them for the future. (He had joined the firm in 1927, only to retire as its director some sixty years later.)