Home > William Schuman

Born in the Bronx in New York City, Schuman played the violin and banjo as a child. As a young man he formed a dance band and wrote songs with his friend Frank Loesser. He went on to study at New York University's School of Commerce, but dropped out to study music instead, Roy Harris being among his teachers. Harris brought Schuman to the attention of the conductor Serge KoussevitzkySergei Aleksandrovich Koussevitzky ( July 26, 1874 June 4, 1951), better known as Serge was a Russian-born conductor. Koussevitzky studied music in Moscow. He was initially a virtuoso double bass player (he wrote a concerto for the instrument in 1905), wi, who championed many of his works.

In 1943 he won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for MusicThe Pulitzer Prize for Music was first awarded in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer did not call for such a prize in his will, but had arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year. This was eventually converted into a full fledged prize. The winners in th for his cantataCantata (Italian for a song or story set to music), a vocal composition accompanied by instruments and generally containing more than one movement. In the 16th century, when all serious music was vocal, the term had no reason to exist, but with the rise o, A Free Song. In 1945, he became president of the Juilliard School of Music, founding the Juilliard String QuartetThe Juilliard String Quartet has been an international presence and an American institution for over fifty years. The quartet began recording with Sony Classical (formerly Columbia Records and CBS Masterworks) in 1949, and the group's discography currentl while there. He left in 1961 to take up directorship of the Lincoln CenterLincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a 15 acre (61,000 m²) complex of buildings in New York which serves as home for 12 arts companies. It was built during Robert Moses's program of urban renewal in the 1960s. It was the first gathering of major cult.

Among Schuman's better known works are ten symphonies, a concertoOrigin Etymology Concerto (from the latin concertus from certare to strive, also confused with concentus , in its most general sense, is a name for a piece of classical music in which there are two distinct groups of instruments, one larger than the other for violin, the William Billings Overture and New England Triptych (both based on melodies by William Billings), the American Festival Overture, the ballet Undertow, and an opera about baseball, The Mighty Casey (based on Ernest L. Thayer's Casey at the Bat). He also arranged Charles Ives' organ piece Variations on "America" for orchestra, in which version it is better known.