“At age eleven, I became infatuated with music,” says Gunther Schuller. Three weeks ago, at age 83, he took a bow on the Symphony Hall stage, after the Boston Symphony première of his latest composition “Where The Word Ends.”

Between eleven and 83, this prodigious musician has lived seven different careers in one: horn player, composer, conductor, jazz historian, music publisher, record producer, and educator and achieved high distinction in each one.

Two weeks ago, at his Newton home, I had the pleasure of talking with Schuller for two hours about his life and his work. We sat in a large room, with a grand piano in one corner, wall shelves loaded with books, large paintings on the wall, and large sheets of music liberally strewn on the couch and the floor.

Among a host of other topics, he spoke about growing older. He did so with a frankness and perception altogether rare in my experience.

“I am much wiser, more tolerant, and more gently critical,” he says of his later years. Beyond that, “the activity of my mind is greater and deeper.” He considers his most recent composition, the one played by the BSO both in Boston and New York, as one of his best.

In later life, along with greater depth to his thinking, he experiences feelings previously unknown. Among these feelings, he acknowledges nostalgia for some of his early compositions that helped to form his artistic development.

In fact, he draws much inspiration from his past. “I’m looking back all the time,” he tells me in a statement that resonates with my own mental habits. “I can be very nostalgic, analytic, about my past.” He constantly wants to know how things got started.

Yet, like so many of the rest of us, Schuller gently complains of his memory failing: “I have to write everything down.” But that, he adds, does not hinder him from continuing to learn a lot.

For his many accomplishments, Gunther Schuller deserves to be much better known than I find him to be. In my own instance, I first became aware of him in the 1970s. That was spearheaded by the rediscovery of Scott Joplin, that master of ragtime who lived in the 19th century and had fallen into underserved oblivion.

When he was president of the New England Conservatory of Music, Schuller organized and led an ensemble that played Joplin’s music with obvious relish, to the great delight of audiences of widely varying sophistication.

(You may have enjoyed this music in “The Sting,” a celebrated movie of 1973. I still remember the excitement of the sound tract behind the action-packed exploits of Robert Redford and his partner Paul Newman.)

Looking back, Gunther Schuller attributes much inspiration to his parents. For 42 years, his father played violin in the New York Philharmonic. As a boy, Gunther discovered that the right instrument for him was not the violin or the piano, but the horn. Early on, he also felt himself drawn to composition.

About genetic influence, he feels it an area of mystery. “These things are all very strange,” he says of his inheritance. His paternal grandfather and great- grandfather were both musicians, something that presumably affected his own development.

For him, New York City was also a great influence. In the decades 1930 through 1960, that city was what he calls “the cultural paradise of the world.” When living and working there, “I was a cultural maniac,” he recalls. “I took advantage of everything that came my way.”

The presidency of the New England Conservatory brought him to Boston in 1967. This city he considers “one of the greatest cultural centers of the world” and he relishes the time spent here

As to the present American scene, he feels mixed. On the upside, he recognizes “so many talents out of every nook and cranny of the country.” On the downside, however, he regrets the influence of much of the pop culture. Television, in particular, has damaged the development of many young people.

For me, it was a unique experience to talk with a composer whose new work I had just heard two weeks previously. That conversation gave me the opportunity to tell him how much I had enjoyed one particular part of Where The Word Ends.

The section that most held me was a passage played on two harps. Rarely have I heard such a rich and extended piece for an instrument that ranks as one of my favorites. The composer told me of the joy he takes in the passage, one that he wrote with the now retired BSO principal harpist in mind.

The notes of that passage remain in my mind’s ear, so to speak ─ a precious memory from the work of a composer whose life has been full of gifts and accomplishments.

Richard Griffin