Operating System

Operating System

Given our ongoing debates about the conservative vs. progressive tendencies of younger composers as well the economics that fuel such music, I thought it would be interesting here to ponder a couple of William Schuman’s remarks about such matters.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

I just finished reading American Muse, Juilliard President Joseph W. Polisi’s lavishly detailed biography of his one-time predecessor, William Schuman. (Peter Mennin served between Schuman and Polisi.) Schuman (1910-1992) was a remarkable figure who, in addition to running Juilliard and subsequently Lincoln Center (and previously G. Schirmer), found time to compose music for at least 600 hours per year. Stay tuned for more about Polisi’s book in the near future. (It is our next scheduled InPrint selection.) But in the meanwhile, given our ongoing debates about the conservative vs. progressive tendencies of younger composers as well the economics that fuel such music, I thought it would be interesting here to ponder a couple of Schuman’s remarks about such matters, as well as a paraphrase of an observation made by Virgil Thomson, one of Schuman’s nemeses, all of which are cited in the book.

First Schuman:

“Systems do not create composers, composers create systems.”

The primary goal and obligation of a composer, as I see it, is to write the best music he or she can write. . . You have to decide what you are willing to put under your signature.

Then Thomson, as paraphrased by Edward Rothstein in a New York Times column assessing Schuman’s legacy that was published a month after Schuman’s death (the words in quotes are Thomson’s original words):

[E]very composition’s style is influenced by the source of the composer’s income. A composer who earns a living outside music writes pieces marked by a naïve quality that can give “a useful kick to the profession,” the way Mussorgsky, Satie and Ives did. Composers who depend on commissions display an “international” style good for “prestige value.” A teaching composer combines the business and pomposity of a schoolmaster with timidity and overscrupulousness.

During the course of reading American Muse, I spent many hours listening to LPs and CDs of Schuman’s output: eight of his ten symphonies (Schuman withdrew the first two), four of five string quartets (Schuman withdrew the first), two ballets, two one-act operas, concertos and/or concerto-like works for piano, violin, cello, and French horn, plus an assortment of works for unaccompanied chorus, wind band, and brass quintet, as well as a few songs he wrote in his teens with his friend Frank Loesser. There was a remarkable consistency to this music, but it defies easy pigeon-holing which might explain why it isn’t getting performed as often these days as it did during his life—among Schuman’s most virulent champions were Martha Graham, Eugene Ormandy, and Leonard Bernstein who even recorded Schuman’s Third Symphony twice!

Schuman’s music defies the binaries we still seem obsessed with setting up. Neither conservative nor progressive, it continually made enemies in both camps. A music critic once belittled Schuman’s music as “blissfully old-fashioned” while a radio listener wrote a complaint to the station that aired it claiming that three days of aspirin couldn’t make the pain of listening to the dissonances go away. Ironically, William Schuman was the first composer ever to receive a commission from a department of the United States government, which actually might be the biggest history lesson in all of this.