Photo by Peter Hastings, Cleveland Orchestra

Myron Bloom was a distinguished performer and teacher, known particularly for his tenure as principal horn with the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell. He was professor of music at Indiana University from 1985 until his death.

Bloom attended a concert with his parents at age 12, under protest, with no interest in music, and walked out of the concert featuring Emanuel Feuermann playing the cello knowing that he wanted his life to be in music. All his life, he was imitating Feuermann and Casals, and his true love was the cello. However, Myron's father encouraged him to play the horn as the war was coming and he needed to get in a band or be shipped to Japan. Myron first began on trumpet, then studied horn with Marty Morris (Cleveland Orchestra), who later was in the section with Myron.

Myron studied with Arkady Yegudkin at Eastman for one year, then went to New York to study with James Chambers. He played in the Navy Band in Great Lakes, Illinois during the war, where he met cellist Frank Miller (always the cello link!).

Bloom was principal horn in the New Orleans Symphony (1949-1954) before joining the Cleveland Orchestra (1954-1977). In 1977 he was principal horn of the Casals Festival Orchestra in Puerto Rico and then at the invitation of Daniel Barenboim became principal horn of the Orchestre de Paris (1977-1985).

In addition to his teaching at Indiana University, Bloom has taught at the Curtis Institute (1982-2001), Carnegie Mellon University (1993-2001), Cleveland Institute of Music (1961-1977), Oberlin Conservatory, Juilliard School of Music, Boston University, and the Conservatoire National Superieur de Music de Paris.

Bloom has been a member of the Marlboro Music Festival from its inception. He has been a jury member at the International Geneva Horn Competition and juries in Canada. He has performed with the Budapest Quartet. His recordings include Strauss Concerto No. 1 with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, Schubert's Auf dem Strom and the Brahms Trio, along with Cleveland Orchestra and Marlboro Music Festival recordings. He influenced the design of Hans Hoyer horns and Houser mouthpiece rims.

Bloom received the Punto Award at the IHS symposium in Bloomington IN in 2003 and was elected an IHS Honorary Member in 2014.

Willie Ruff has been one of the pioneers of the horn in jazz, as a duo has performed at thousands of schools and colleges, and has been an international ambassador of music, from Africa to Russia and China.

Willie was born in Sheffield, Alabama, which is in the area known as Muscle Shoals, famous for freshwater mussels, W.C. Handy, Helen Keller, and music recording studios. Willie was one of eight children, and his father left the family before Willie was a year old. His mother died from tuberculosis when Willie was 13.

The schools were segregated at this time, and Willie attended a poor school for blacks, but the teachers valued music. Willie remembered a visit by W.C. Handy, who played a trumpet and explained his music to the students, and later the school had a part-time band director. Willie started singing as a child and learned drumming from a neighbor and piano at church. He also learned to play the "hambone" – using hands against parts of the body such as chest and thighs, a technique developed by slaves when their traditional drums where outlawed.

After his mother died, Willie went to live with his father and attend high school in Evansville, Indiana. The next year, in 1946, at age 14, he lied about his age, forged his father's signature, and joined the Army on the expectation of developing a career as a drummer. When the band had too many percussionists and the horns (playing mellophones – "peck horns") were the weakest section, Willie volunteered to learn to play the horn. He learned on his own from an Oscar Franz method book, practicing in the boiler room.

When Willie was 16 years old and playing in the band at segregated Lockbourne Air force Base near Columbus, Ohio, he started taking lessons from Abe Kniaz, first horn in the Columbus Philharmonic Orchestra. He discovered that he had been using incorrect fingerings and soon improved his technique, musical knowledge, and other knowledge under Kniaz's guidance. It was while stationed at Lockbourne that Willie met his future duo partner, Dwike Mitchell. Willie also learned to play bass at Dwike's urging and earned his high school equivalency diploma.

Willie left the service to attend Yale University, from which he held both undergraduate and graduate degrees. Upon receiving his master’s degree in 1954, he tried to win a position with an American symphony orchestra, but found that black musicians were not yet welcome in those ranks. Instead, he accepted a position with the Tel Aviv Symphony. Not long before he was to leave, he happened to watch The Ed Sullivan Show and saw not only Lionel Hampton’s band but, to his surprise, his friend Dwike Mitchell at the piano. After contacting his old friend, Willie was invited to join the Hampton band and so he never went to Israel. In 1955, the two friends left Hampton to form the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, with Willie on horn and bass.

The Duo recorded, performed, and lectured on jazz extensively in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe. It had the advantage, Willie related, of being the least expensive group in jazz, and it was therefore booked as the second act with the best and most expensive bands of the day – Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie – in Birdland, the Embers, the Village Vanguard, Basin Street East and other leading nightclubs. They were all riding the crest of one of the most popular eras of jazz – an era that would soon end with the advent of rock and the dominance of television.

In the late 1950s they toured widely for a group called Young Audiences, playing and demonstrating jazz for students in elementary schools and high schools, and since the mid-1960s their main format the college concert. They gave 60 or 70 concerts a year on college campuses. It was the Mitchell-Ruff Duo that introduced jazz to the Soviet Union, in 1959, playing and teaching at conservatories in Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Yalta, Sochi, and Riga; and it was the Mitchell-Ruff Duo that took jazz to China, in 1981, playing and teaching at conservatories in Shanghai and Peking (now Beijing). Before the first trip, Willie taught himself Russian, his seventh language, and before the second trip he learned Mandarin Chinese, thereby enabling himself to explain to his listeners, in their own language, the roots and lineage of American jazz, with Dwike demonstrating on the piano.

Willie joined the faculty at Yale in 1971, and taught Music History, courses on Ethnomusicology, an interdisciplinary Seminar on Rhythm, and a course on Instrumental Arranging. He was founding Director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship Program at Yale, a community-based organization sponsoring world-class artists mentoring and performing with Yale students and young musicians from the New Haven Public School System. The program brought the giants of black American music to New Haven throughout the year to teach at Yale and in the city’s predominantly black public schools: singers like Odetta and Bessie Jones, arrangers like Benny Carter, tap dancers like Honi Coles, and instrumentalists like Charlie Mingus and Dizzy Gillespie.

Willie’s 1992 memoir, A Call to Assembly, was awarded the Deems Taylor ASCAP award. He also wrote widely on Paul Hindemith, one of his teachers at Yale, and on his professional association with the American composers Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Strayhorn wrote a suite for horn and piano for Willie and Dwike. His collaborations with Yale geologist John Rodgers on the musical astronomy of the 17th-century scientist, Johannes Kepler, resulted in an important "planetarium for the ear" recording and published widely in international astronomy journals. Willie also wrote on music and dance in Russia, and on the introduction of American Jazz in China. Film was also an important teaching tool to him, and he visited the pygmies of the Central African Republic, the master drummers of Bali, the tribesmen of Senegal, and various other remote societies to make films about their drum music and language.

Willie was elected an IHS Honorary Member in 2001. In 2005 he and Dwike performed a rousing concert at the Northeast Horn Workshop in Purchase, New York with Ruff's former teacher, Abe Kniaz, in the audience. Willie said, "How many people perform a concert at age 73 and have their teacher in the audience?" Willie remembered being told that music doesn't mean a thing unless it tells a story, and that's the way he played it.

Willie’s teaching was based on storytelling through melodies. He was committed to nurturing talent and celebrating musical diversity. Beyond the accolades and achievements, Willie was a friend to many. His warmth, humility, and support touched the lives of those he encountered. His passing leaves a void in the musical realm.

"Scholar, composer, conductor, teacher, author, music publisher, indefatigable advocate − Gunther Schuller isn't merely a musician, he's a monopoly." This description by Alan Rich in New York Magazine summarizes the multi-faceted career of this Pulitzer Prize-winning practitioner of the 28-hour day. Schuller coined the term "third stream" to describe the union of jazz and classical music − a clue as to how he straddled and combined the two genres.

The son of German immigrants, Gunther Alexander Schuller was born in New York in 1925, appropriately enough on St. Cecelia Day, patron saint of musicians, November 22nd. After attending a private school in Germany, where an accident resulted in the loss of one eye, he returned to New York and enrolled at the St. Thomas Church Choir School, where he studied music and sang as a boy soprano. He also began to study flute and horn, and was engaged by the New York Philharmonic as a substitute hornist when he was 15. During his high school years, he also studied music theory and counterpoint at the Manhattan School of Music. He joined the Cincinnati Symphony as principal horn at age 17 and the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera at age 19, where he played for 15 years. Although he was mostly hired as principal horn, Schuller later said that he loved playing fourth horn. He balanced his performing and composing careers by composing all night after playing opera performances. But by 1959 his schedule had become too arduous, and he decided to give up performing to devote himself more fully to composition.

At the age of 25, Schuller taught horn at the Manhattan School of Music, beginning a distinguished teaching career; his positions have included Professor of Composition at the School of Music at Yale (1964-67), President of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston (1967-77), Artistic Director of the Tanglewood Berkshire Music Center (1970-1984), the Spokane Bach Festival, and The Festival at Sandpoint (Idaho), and Co-Director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra. His love of a wide range of American music guided the activities of his publishing and recording companies, Margun Music (now part of G. Schirmer) and GM Recordings.

Schuller is acknowledged as father of the Third Stream movement. He became interested in jazz in Cincinnati, primarily through the music of Duke Ellington, which he transcribed from recordings and arranged for the Cincinnati Pops. He was actively involved in the New York bebop scene, performing and recording with such jazz greats as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and pianist John Lewis. He wrote a series of works to perform with Lewis, with both the Modern Jazz Quartet and a larger ensemble, the Modern Jazz Society. Typically, in these collaborations, Lewis would lead a jazz ensemble augmented by strings or woodwinds, which Schuller conducted. Schuller worked with Arturo Toscanini, Miles Davis, Aaron Copland, Ornette Coleman, Leonard Bernstein, Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, John Updike (librettist for Schuller's opera The Fisherman and His Wife), Joe Lovano, Elvis Costello, Wynton Marsalis, Frank Zappa, and others. “The Third Stream movement,” he once said, “inspires composers, improvisers and players to work together toward the goal of a marriage of musics, whether ethnic or otherwise, that have been kept apart by the tastemakers − fusing them in a profound way. And I think it’s appropriate that this has happened in this country, because America is the original cultural melting pot.”

Schuller created original compositions in virtually every musical genre, including commissions from the Baltimore Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Boston Musica Viva, Chicago Symphony, Minneapolis Symphony, National Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic. Commissions include his 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning work Of Reminiscences and Reflections for the Louisville Orchestra; An Arc Ascending for the American Symphony Orchestra League and the Cincinnati Symphony; The Past is in the Present, also for the Cincinnati Symphony; a Sextet for Leon Fleisher and the Kennedy Center Chamber Players; Brass Quintet No. 2 for the American Brass Quintet; an Organ Concerto for the 1994 Calgary International Organ Festival; and Ritmica-Melodica-Armonica for the Newton Symphony Orchestra. In 2010 the Boston Symphony commissioned a large work, Where the Word Ends, and in 2014 performed his earlier Dreamscape in Boston and New York. He composed to the end of his life.

Schuller was self-taught as a composer. He was partial to the 12-tone methods of the Second Viennese School, but he was not inextricably bound to them. Arnold Schoenberg and Duke Ellington were both musical lodestars. Schuller used serial technique in most of his compositions, and in fact used the same tone row in a number of diverse works. He wrote for unusual instrumental combinations, such as a Symphony for Brass and Percussion, quartets of four double basses and four cellos, more than 20 concertos, including for double bass, contrabassoon, alto saxophone, and a Grand Concerto for Percussion and Keyboards.

Schuller gathered together a lifetime of observations on conducting in his book The Compleat Conductor (Oxford University Press). His extensive writings, on a variety of subjects ranging from jazz through music performance, contemporary music, music aesthetics, and education, have been issued in Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller. His monumental jazz history, The Swing Era, was published in 1989. In 2011 he published an autobiography, Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty. He wrote an article on the Brahms Horn Trio weeks before his death.

Among Schuller's many awards are: a MacArthur Foundation “genius” Award (1991); the Pulitzer Prize (1994); inaugural Member of the American Classical Music Hall of Fame; DownBeat Lifetime Achievement Award; the Gold Medal for Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1997); the BMI Lifetime Achievement Award (1994); the William Schuman Award (1988) given by Columbia University for "lifetime achievement in American music composition"; and several Grammy Awards. Though a high school drop-out, Schuller also received twelve honorary degrees from various colleges and universities. “As a composer and teacher,” composer Augusta Read Thomas, the chairwoman of the selection committee for the MacDowell award, said at the time, “he has inspired generations of students, setting an example of discovery and experimentation.”In 2000, the IHS elected Schuller an Honorary Member for his lifelong contributions to music and the horn. When contacted about the award, he said, "This is a special honor for me because I haven't played the horn since 1963. I am very grateful to be so honored in the company of many other great horn colleagues."

While his numerous contributions to the larger music world are widely known, perhaps Schuller's best known contribution to the horn world is his book Horn Technique, first published in 1962 and later re-issued by Oxford University Press. His compositions, covering a full range of musical genres, have included or featured the horn in almost every one. In addition to his challenging large ensemble works, he composed numerous chamber works including horns in traditional settings (e.g., brass quintets) and innovative combinations, and as featured instrument: two horn concertos, a horn sonata (commissioned by the IHS), Lines and Contrasts for 16 horns, Five Pieces for Five Horns (recorded by Barry Tuckwell and the NFB Horn Quartet), and the Quintet for horn and strings (co-commissioned by the IHS, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, and the La Jolla Music Society and premiered by Julie Landsman and the Miró Quartet in 2009).

In the final pages of his memoir, Schuller wrote: “All I can say for myself is that I at least have tried hard to use my all too brief time on this planet as fruitfully as possible, as productively as I could imagine…. The only thing about the prospect of dying that upsets me – that I grieve over – is that I will never again hear all that beautiful music that I have come to know and love. But then some people tell me that I will, in fact, hear all that music – and more – in the afterlife.”

Material from The Boston Globe and New York Times obituaries is included here.