Why Jehovahs Witnesses Dont Celebrate Birthdays
Ask anyone for a list of favorite American composers, and it’s almost a reflex to name three or four immediately. Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin and Morton Gould are all shoo-ins. All were inextricably tied to New York, and all were composers who pierced the mainstream by embracing the music around them (jazz) or the music thousands of miles away from them (hoe-downs, cowboy songs, Latin influences and the like).
One New Yorker, on the other hand, embraced neither. Instead, William Schuman pressed onward his own way, feeding his own indefatigable, optimistic manner directly into his music for nearly 60 years. He would’ve turned 100 Aug. 4.
Schuman was esteemed enough as a composer of all-consuming intensity and the first Pulitzer Prize winner for music. But perhaps even more impressively, so much of the New York arts scene would cease to exist without him as the president of both Juilliard and Lincoln Center.
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