On today’s date in 1961, the New York City Ballet presented a new work scored by a 35-year old composer named Gunther Schuller, who was conducting the pit orchestra. On stage, in the middle of the green- and purple-garbed dancers, were four additional musicians: namely, the Modern Jazz Quartet, decked out in their usual white ties and tails. Schuller’s score, entitled “Variants,” was an attempt to fuse modern music and jazz into a style he labeled “Third Stream.”

”I had this idea of the First and Second streams [classical and jazz] getting married and giving birth to a child, which is the Third stream," recalled Schuller years later, ruefully noting that today one would have to call it the “10,000th stream” as composers have since introduced a multitude of ethnic, folk and vernacular music into the mix as well.

But back in 1961, the idea attracted a lot of press – not all favorable. The New Yorker, for example, thought it odd that the MJQ “sat like a quartet of hunters in a duck blind, anxiously shooting out carefully calculated notes.” Time magazine wrote: “Schuller’s score was the essence of the cool – spare, fragmentary, but resembling jazz only in its rhythmic drive.” If this was the “Third Stream,” the reviewer concluded, “it never seemed to be flowing anywhere.”