Casey at the Baton

A music man replaced a soldier last week during a changing of the guard at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Elected president of the still unfinished, $142 million center (future home of the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Juilliard School of Music, a repertory drama theater, and possibly the New York City Center) was Composer William Howard Schuman, 51, Juilliard's president for the past 16 years. He succeeds General Maxwell Taylor, who resigned as Lincoln Center's president last summer to become President Kennedy's military adviser (TIME cover, July 28).

Schuman, a lean, balding and relaxed man, is best known as a composer of symphonies ("I'm 7 1/2 symphonies old," he said recently), quartets, cantatas, concertos, ballet scores. In 1943, he won the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded in music for his A Free Song. In 1949, he was commissioned to write Judith, music for a dance by Martha Graham.

Love at First Sound. A modernist who was grounded in classical techniques, Schuman never strayed into the far-out realms of atonality or mechanical idiosyncrasies. His serious musical education started late, but he learned fast. As a boy on Manhattan's upper West Side, Schuman was totally uninterested in anything long-haired. He had a passing fling with jazz, played the banjo and the violin in a jazz band he formed in high school, and wrote, with Frank Loesser, such pop songs as In Love with the Memory of You. Baseball was his enduring passion: "Had I been a better catcher, I might never have been a musician." His only opera, The Mighty Casey, is about Mudville's heroic slugger.

When Schuman was 19, his older sister coaxed him off the sand lots long enough to sit through a concert by the New York Philharmonic. It was love at first sound.

Schuman immediately enrolled in a music school, later went off to study at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, eventually worked under Contemporary Composer Roy Harris. At the age of 34, Schuman, still a veritable novice, was appointed head of staid old Juilliard. Said an apprehensive trustee: "This will either be the greatest thing that ever happened to Juilliard or the most colossal error of our collective lives."

Ventilated Curriculum. But Schuman proved an able administrator and an adroit innovator. Under his baton were launched the famed Juilliard String Quartet, a department of dance, fresh courses in the theory of music. Along with their technical lessons in music, students at Juilliard were encouraged to study counterpoint and harmony of a different kind: sociology and race relations. "Musical education has to be ventilated," explained Schuman. "We must develop educated people who are musicians in order to develop music."

Schuman still spends some 600 hours each year composing music, but the gigantic task of whipping Lincoln Center into shape may force him to cut back on that rigorous schedule. "All the words about Lincoln Center have been spoken," said he last week. "Now we must make them realities through specific projects." Schuman is already turning several projects over in his mind, but he insists, "I don't want to announce any plans that are half-baked." If his plans are still vague, William Schuman's dream is not: "It is to make Lincoln Center a dynamic and constructive force in the arts."

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