Ventilation for Juilliard

The rafters of Manhattan's $20,000,000-endowed Juilliard School of Music were still shaking. The new president had just taken over--35-year-old William Schuman, prolific young symphonist whose latest performed composition was a score for the Ballet Theatre's Freudian ballet, Undertow, which is all about a sex murder. Said Schuman of his new job at Juilliard: "It's like Westbrook Pegler taking over PM." Actually it was more like a New Republic editor taking over the Saturday Evening Post.

Last week Schuman planned his first reform: the addition of courses like sociology and race-relations to Juilliard's harmony and counterpoint curriculum. This, he hopes, will "make responsible adults of musicians." He explained: "Right now, when we need musical leaders in every community, we are concerned only with training virtuosi for a nonexistent market. Musical education has to be ventilated. We must develop educated people who are musicians in order to develop music."

No kin to the German romanticist Robert Schumann, Juilliard's new president is New York-born, taught music for ten years at Sarah Lawrence College. Since 1938, when Serge Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony Orchestra played Schuman's Second Symphony, he has been one of the most consistently performed of contemporary composers. His most popular scores: the American Festival Overture, Fourth Symphony. Schuman still composes for three hours a day in the basement of his home before he goes off to school at noon.

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