1935-1945
The Sarah Lawrence Years
He made a cold call to president Constance Warren. He was offered a temporary job to cover all of the fine arts in a one-year course. Ten years later, he left as one of the most popular and famous professors of the college.
1935
- begins temporary full-time position at Sarah Lawrence: “In the Art department Mr. William H. Schuman, graduate of Teachers College, Columbia, and candidate for an advanced degree in music at Columbia, will take a group of beginning students in correlated work in the arts.” Starting salary = $2,400/year
- completes his Symphony no. 1 (December 28)
1936
- receives contract for 1936–37 academic year (early March)
- marries Frankie Prince (March 27)
- befriends composer–conductor Lehman Engel
- teaches summer course in orchestration and arranging at Columbia University
- begins lessons with Roy Harris through the Juilliard Summer School
- String Quartet no. 1 (August 19)
- hears his works performed in an all-Schuman Composers’ Forum–Laboratory concert: String Quartet no. 1; Symphony no. 1; Four Canonic Choruses (October 21)
- first version of Prelude for Voices (December 19)
1937
- seeks out a score of Harris’s Symphony 1933
- writes to the New York Times in defense of Harris’s music
- writes, with SLC colleague Horace Grenell, Sounds: A Study of Orchestral Color (Musicraft Records)
- helps Stravinsky with the final preparation of the parts for Jeu de Cartes (late winter–early spring)
- Choral Etude (April 21)
- Pioneers! (May 1)
- travels to Europe for a belated honeymoon (June–July)
- Prelude and Fugue for Orchestra; (transcription of the second and fourth movement of the First String Quartet) (June 28–July 10)
- serves as secretary to the fledging and ill-fated American Composers Committee
- String Quartet no. 2 (November 1)
- Symphony no. 2 (November 1–December 23)
1938
- Choral Etude wins a choral competition held by the Federal Music Project (January)
- is invited to conduct the Sarah Lawrence Chorus beginning in the fall
- the Second Symphony wins a competition held by the Musicians’ Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy (April)
- Three Pieces for Piano (June 15)
- accepts a commission to write a ballet, Playground (October)
- Copland suggests that Schuman send the Second Symphony to Koussevitzky, who programs it for the Boston Symphony Orchestra
- seeks out a publisher for the Second Symphony
1939
- joins Ashley Pettis and Harris on a Rockefeller Foundation committee charged with surveying music and the role of the composer in American life
- Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform the Second Symphony (February 17–18); Koussevitzky invites Schuman to write another composition for that fall
- meets Harvard College student Leonard Bernstein
- receives the first of his two Guggenheim fellowships
- Prologue for Chorus and Orchestra (May 7)
- cancels the ballet commission: “I must free myself for other things. Playground at this writing no longer sustains in me the creative impetus it impelled.” (May 27)
- At The Crossroads (for World’s Fair New York City) (1939)
- The Orchestra Song (for voices)
- travels with Frankie to Hollywood to visit Copland
- awarded the first-ever League of Composers–Town Hall composition commission
- American Festival Overture (July 28)
- String Quartet no. 3 (December)
1940
- receives a renewal of his Guggenheim fellowship
- Howard Barlow performs the Second Symphony with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
- performs old English rounds with the Sarah Lawrence Chorus
- This Is Our Time (June)
- writes to Harold Ickes, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, about the possibility of setting Ickes’s Independence Day speech (August 6)
- registers for the draft (October 16)
1941
- Symphony no. 3 (January 11)
- Choral Fanfare for Women’s Voices (January 17)
- replies to the query “Do political events affect composition?” at a visit to the NYC High School of Music and Art: “Composition is the result of your life’s experience and will be influenced by it, but music alone cannot express a detailed political philosophy.” (June 1)
- delivers the commencement address at Sarah Lawrence (with Cora DuBois, anthropology)
- hears Bernstein conduct the American Festival Overture at Tanglewood (July 18)
- Symphony no. 4 (August 17)
- Newsreel in Five Shots (November 16)
- teams up with Christopher LaFarge to write a work for the Metropolitan Opera (December)
- looks into enlisting in the Armed Services (December)
1942
- Fair Land of Hope
- Requiescat (February 4)
- Holiday Song (May 26)
- wins the first-ever New York Music Critics’ Circle Award for the Third Symphony (May)
- backs out of opera project with LaFarge (June)
- Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra (July 18)
- receives news that his application to join the Army Specialist Corps is denied (September)
- A Free Song (October 16)
- meets Robert Shaw and hears the Collegiate Chorale for the first time (fall)
- meets and agrees to teach composition to Seymour Shifrin
1943
- Prayer in Time of War (January 2)
- prepares the Sarah Lawrence Chorus to sing Debussy’s La damoiselle elué with Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (winter)
- receives an Arts and Letters grant of $1,000 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters
- wins the first-ever Pulitzer Prize in Music for A Free Song (cash award of $500)
- turns down a job at the Peabody Conservatory of Music
- receives a Koussevitzky Foundation commission ($1,000)
- becomes an officer in the Walt Whitman Society of America
- Three-Score Set (July 21)
- Symphony for Strings (July 31)
- William Billings Overture (November 23)
- *Anthony William Schuman (December 22)
1944
- receives a contract for his last year at Sarah Lawrence; salary = $4,250/yr. (just above the median at the time)
- Steel Town (April 8)
- receives a commission from the Ballet Theatre ($1,000) (July)
- Molto tranquillo [Variation on a Theme of Eugene Goossens]
- Circus Overture (July 20)
- Orpheus With His Lute
- Te Deum
- receives the offer to become Director of Publications at G. Schirmer; starting salary = $10,000/yr; term of service to begin in May of 1945 (September)
1945
- Undertow (February 22)
- Fanfare, Song & Dance (ca. 1945?)
- is offered the presidency of the Juilliard School of Music (June)