Composer's Curriculum

In its 57 years, the Juilliard School of Music has played a leading role in helping the U.S. to attain a musical identity of its own. In the process, the school has largely been molded in the image of its presidents, including 51-year-old William Schuman, who recently resigned to head Manhattan's new Lincoln Center. Last week Juilliard got a new president, Peter Mennin, 39, a distinguished composer who figures he will make a good start by just keeping pace with the conservatory's present high standards.

Professional Potential. In his 16 years at Juilliard, Schuman. the man most responsible for its continuing role as the nation's No. 1 conservatory, made it flourish as never before. In place of oldfashioned theory courses, he instituted a widely discussed curriculum called "Literature and Materials of Music," which used the music of the past as text and was largely taught by composers. The Juilliard that Mennin inherits has a flourishing dance department that numbers in its faculty Martha Graham. Antony Tudor, Jose Limon, and a topnotch quartet-in-residence, headed by Violinist Robert Mann. Juilliard stresses contemporary music, believing that "musicians of a given epoch have the responsibility for the music of their time." It emphasizes student performances, which frequently are attended by artists' managers and talent scouts for major orchestras and opera houses. Van Cliburn, Leontyne Price and John Browning were all signed after Juilliard performances.

So well tested are the Juilliard philosophy and formula that at least one-third of the nation's home-trained concert artists are Juilliard alumni. Increasingly.

Juilliard plans to enroll only students of truly professional potential. Selecting its high-caliber students, integrating Juilliard with the other parts of Lincoln Center, where it will soon move, and adding a drama wing to the school's music and dance divisions, promise to be a job that will keep Mennin as frantically occupied as any of his predecessors.

Impeccable Innovator. At Baltimore's famed Peabody Conservatory, which he headed before accepting the Juilliard job, Mennin was a firm administrator and an impeccable dresser. He was also an innovator: he founded a new theater to present little-known operas, and an imaginative project (financed by the Ford Foundation) to find and train gifted young composers. For all that, Mennin (whose father is named Mennini) rarely arrived at his office much before noon.

Reason: he composed music in the early mornings.

One of the nation's foremost composers, Mennin won the first Gershwin Memorial Award, two Guggenheims, the Beams Prize of Columbia University, and awards from the Naumburg Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. By the end of the year, Mennin, best known for his vigorous Sixth Symphony, hopes to complete his seventh.

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