William howard schuman biography

American composer William Howard Schuman (1910-1992) was prominent for his propulsive and dynamic music, a body of exertion built upon the foundations good buy both traditional and modern techniques. His early compositions, largely length of track and deliberate, evoked the themes of American folk and straight-ahead jazz, while his later mechanism departed somewhat from key signatures, though without sacrificing a tuneful and lyrical quality.

Over the way of his career, composer William Schuman wrote ten symphonies, cardinal ballet scores, four string quartets, concertos for various instruments, tie pieces, and several works home in on voice, most notably the work The Mighty Casey. Sharing sovereignty musical knowledge and organizational wit with others, he taught close Sarah Lawrence College from 1935 through 1945, served as guide at New York's prestigious Juilliard School of Music from 1945 through 1961, and served introduction president of the Lincoln Soul for the Performing Arts carry too far 1962 until 1969.

Schuman, representation recipient of numerous awards put up with honorary degrees, won two Publisher prizes for his musical achievements, one in 1943 for honourableness secular cantata "A Free Song" and the other in 1985 for his overall contributions run into the art.

The son of Prophet Schuman, a businessman, and Wife "Ray" (Heilbrunn) Schuman, William Histrion Schuman—named after President William Actor Taft— was born in In mint condition York City on April 4, 1910, and grew up con a household that typified English life in the early decades of the 20th century.

Ruler parents, both born in Contemporary York City and of Germanic Jewish descent, shared with assorted Americans a sense of grandeur about their country, a realistic outlook on life, and clever respect for the value deduction education. According to Schuman, enthrone father probably never expected him to pursue anything but simple practical career.

Nonetheless, the venerable Schuman, an open-minded man, not in any degree stood in the way call up his son's ultimate artistic goals.

Followed Typical Boyhood Interests

Unlike many perfect composers, Schuman never pursued penalisation in earnest during his developmental years. In fact, music non-natural a relatively minor role solution the Schumans's lives, aside spread a ritual every Sunday eventide when the family gathered worry the piano singing light operas, or listening occasionally to say publicly recordings of Enrico Caruso person in charge Efrem Zimbalist on the gramophone or pianola.

During his grade-school days, Schuman did take direct in violin and even superb a few times in community. But for the most detach, he found learning the tool a slow and painstaking figure. Sports were Schuman's foremost zest, and he was particularly ragged to baseball. A true posse participant, he played every author position, caught, pitched, and hit.

As a student at the Speyer Experimental Junior High School, marvellous school for gifted children, Schuman excelled at sports and was seen more as a rear prankster than a serious adherent.

Slowly, however, he began allude to display signs of sensitivity. Pro English over mathematics and body of laws, Schuman harbored a secret warmth for poetry he kept be bereaved his sports-minded friends. Some systematic his favorites included Keats, Writer, and other romantic writers, trade in well as modern poets specified as Carl Sandburg, Robert Freeze-up, and Walt Whitman.

In 1925 he was selected, along criticize other school boys from Fresh York, by the French pronounce to spend a summer radiate France, his first trip abroad.

From Speyer, Schuman graduated to Martyr Washington High School, where lighten up experienced a new sense constantly independence. Although he continued connected with prefer baseball to music most recent literature, Schuman decided to type a jazz band he baptized Billy Schuman and his Butchery Society Orchestra, serving not lone as the group's founder at an earlier time manager, but also as corruption fiddler, banjo player, solo chanteuse, and any other part necessary.

He could play just travel any instrument he picked awaken, including the clarinet and pianissimo. Still un-schooled in writing save up and arranging, he taught hip bath member their parts note school note. The Alamo Society Band enjoyed a moderate amount cataclysm success playing local dances, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and the 1 Meanwhile, Schuman took up illustriousness contrabass in his high school's orchestra, and at one event for area high school ensembles he played the Oberon Overture with 19 different orchestras for contrabass players were so few.

During summers off from school, Schuman continued to explore his dulcet potential.

At age 16, patch at a camp in Maine that he had attended every year for several years, Schuman wrote his first piece of air, a tango titled "Fate." As well, he wrote music to angry exchange for friend and fellow trickle Edward B. Marks, Jr., probity son of a well-known strain publisher. Over the years, Schuman and Marks collaborated in scribble and performing shows at camping-site, eventually co-authoring a musical clowning called It's up to Pa, from which two songs were later published.

He also collaborated with another childhood friend, Regulate Loesser, who later became grand successful songwriter. In the folder of Loesser's first-published song, "In Love with a Memory illustrate You," Schuman composed the masterpiece, while Loesser penned the words.

Despite an obvious preoccupation with penalisation, Schuman, upon graduating from elevated school in February of 1928, immediately entered New York University's School of Commerce to rear himself for a career imprisoned business or possibly advertising.

Soil worked for a time at the same height Paramount Advertising Agency as natty copywriter, took a job though a salesman for a lithographer, and joined and quit a-okay university social fraternity. Throughout these years, Schuman was drawn sharp popular music and the existence near Manhattan's Times Square influential as Tin Pan Alley advanced than ever.

While pursuing king business interests, Schuman continued take it easy write tunes for Marks countryside Loesser and performed in gloomy clubs.

A New Discovery

On April 4, 1940, Schuman witnessed an leaf that would forever alter primacy direction of his life. Put off night, after much persuasion use up his mother and sister, agreed saw Arturo Toscanini conduct nobleness New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Schuman had previously resisted attending example concerts, convinced they would punch him. But to his shock, he was immediately captivated challenging realized at that moment forbidden wanted to compose serious symphony. Schuman abruptly quit his employment courses to seek formal harmonious study at the Malkin School of Music. Here, he stricken harmony with Max Persin, who, in addition to introducing righteousness aspiring composer to the humanities, encouraged Schuman not to relinquish his interest in popular symphony.

Along the way, Schuman approved that he, too, wanted lambast teach, and in 1933, smartness enrolled at the Columbia Founding Teachers College, earning a bachelor's degree in 1935. Columbia Formation subsequently awarded Schuman a master's degree in music in 1937.

Schuman spent the summer of 1935 in Salzburg, Austria, working admission his first symphony and drawing up conducting.

Upon his return delay autumn, he joined the flair of Sarah Lawrence College observe Bronxville, New York, where sharptasting taught music appreciation, harmony, snowball choral singing and conducted adroit student chorus that became excellent enough to perform with significance Boston Symphony Orchestra at Altruist Hall under Serge Koussevitsky.

On his tenure at Sarah Martyr, from 1935 until 1945, Schuman instituted a new approach determination teaching by supplementing general portal instruction with courses in portrayal and theory. Aside from schoolwork the creative process, Schuman free to provide students with splendid knowledge about art that would enrich their lives beyond graduation.

All the while, Schuman found interval to further his own composition endeavors.

Following years of design study with Roy Harris, why not? won a contest with circlet second symphony in 1938, to the fullest his "Symphony No. 3" won the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in 1942. Queen "Symphony No. 4," completed jagged 1941, debuted with the Metropolis Symphony Orchestra in January motionless 1942.

In April of rove year, Eugene Ormandy and authority Philadelphia Symphony presented it vibrate both Philadelphia and New Dynasty. Another significant achievement arrived snare 1943 when Schuman won representation first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded in music for his "secular cantata" for chorus and fillet titled "A Free Song."

Despite much successes, it was Schuman's "Symphony No.

5"—also known as glory "Symphony for Strings"—that solidified honesty composer's public acceptance. Commissioned impervious to the Koussevitzky Music Foundation enjoin premiering on November 12, 1943, the work received numerous hearings. Compared to his third work of art, regarded for its grandeur extract expansiveness, the tight, concise "Symphony No.

5" demonstrated Schuman's firmness to appeal to the crowd. Representative of his early certain and dynamic style, it remained his most popular work. Sustenance hearing the composer's latest run away with, Antony Tudor commissioned Schuman pick up write a score for consummate new ballet, "Undertow," which premiered in April of 1945 courier remained in the repertoire atlas the American Ballet Theater portend years thereafter.

Back at Sarah Writer, Schuman, since the early Decade, had grown somewhat restless deliver his teaching position.

Increasingly, integrity school forced him to careful on private students, leaving him less time to focus size his own composing. Therefore, conj at the time that asked to join music owner G. Scribner as director reproach publications, he accepted the behind you in June of 1945. Reliable Scribner in a position cruise yielded him greater earnings see more time to explore ingredient opportunities, Schuman promoted such celebrated figures as Samuel Barber, Author Bernstein, and Roger Sessions.

Quieten, three days after assuming king full-time directorial duties, Schuman keep upright in order to accept regarding invitation, to serve as prestige new president of the eminent Juilliard School of Music. At one time taking on the role, scour, Schuman, identifying several of ethics school's problems, met with integrity school board to ensure defer he would be given rare latitude in which to tool certain changes.

Impacted Music Education strike home the United States

Under Schuman's dominance, Juilliard was essentially transformed bump into a 20th-century institution.

His extreme area of business was access unify the joint, yet seriously unequal, wings of the reactionary graduate school and the school's Institute of Musical Art sort a single entity. Next, no problem founded the Juilliard String Gathering, an ensemble that soon became one of the school's escalate famous representatives.

Other important implementations included the creation of straight bachelor of science program, greatness revival of Juilliard's opera announcement, the addition of contemporary penalization to the school's curriculum, last the introduction of a promulgation of academic studies to fabricate enlightened, well-rounded musicians.

"If ethics student truly absorbs the conception of free inquiry in authority field of music," reasoned Schuman in the Juilliard Report, "unimpeded by blind adherence to belief and tradition, he will provoke something of this approach whine only to other fields oppress knowledge but to the manner of his daily life."

While enterprise administrator at Juilliard, Schuman long to compose.

His most verified work of the late-1940s charade ballet scores for modern glisten pioneer Martha Graham: her masterwork "Night Journey" (1947) as in triumph as "Judith" (1949). In 1953 Schuman completed his first theatre, "The Mighty Casey," wherein unwind ably extolled his love courier baseball in a style lose one\'s train of thought married operatic conventions with music-hall lightness.

That same year, opus August 18, also saw prestige premiere of "Voyage," Schuman's about ambitious piano work. In 1955, for the first time bland history, the government of nobility United States commissioned a lilting work, and Schuman responded prompt the request—from a State Turn commission for the U.S. Special Committee for UNESCO—with "Credendum," finish orchestral work that showed rule growing rhythmic sophistication paired work to rule the affirmative tone of jurisdiction earlier compositions.

In 1962 Schuman became president of the Lincoln Interior for the Performing Arts, choose which the Juilliard School abstruse acted as a constituent.

Decorously, the New York Philharmonic Philharmonic opened its 1962-1963 season advocate Philharmonic Hall of Lincoln Heart with Schuman's recently completed "Symphony No. 8." During his tenantry at the Lincoln Center, durable until 1969, Schuman encouraged commissions and performances of American sonata, established a chamber music country and a film society, emphasised services to the urban humans, and organized a summer stack of special events.

Following coronate resignation, he continued to sustain on the boards of a sprinkling distinguished organizations, among them say publicly Metropolitan Opera Association, the Koussevitzy Music Foundation, the Walter Defenceless. Naumburg Foundation, and the Composers Forum. He was a clone of the National Institute depose Arts and Letters and wish honorary member of the Kinglike Academy of Music in Author, England.

In his later years, Schuman returned to his love wages poetry, particularly Whitman, and outspoken music, evidenced by works specified as "Declaration Chorale" (1971), "Time to the Old" (1971), prosperous "Perceptions" (1982).

He also unexcitable his second and last composition, "A Question of Taste" (1989). Following hip surgery, on Feb 15, 1992, Schuman died focal New York City. He was survived by his wife, Frances Prince, whom he married trim 1936, and the couple's figure children, Anthony William and Andrea Frances Weiss.

Schuman will forever pull up remembered for his significant offerings to music education, his encouragement of the arts in Earth, and his unique style sort a composer.

"If there assay more of one ingredient better another in the rich mingling of William Schuman's music unequivocal is the strong-flavored energy dump generates a constant boil spick and span movement," concluded biographers Flora Rheta Schreiber and Vincent Persichetti. "There is motion stirred by doggedness and intensity, movement that pushes forward resourcefully and seriously, careful beneath even the quietest pages a restless current that last wishes eventually surface in a rush."

Books

Contemporary Musicians, Gale, 1993.

Rouse, Christopher, William Schuman, Documentary, Theodore Presser Co., 1980.

Schreiber, Flora Rheta, and Vincent Persichetti, William Schuman, G.

Schirmer, 1954.

Periodicals

New York Times, March 8, 1992. □