William Schuman

Won the first Pulitzer Prize for Music ever awarded, in 1943, for his Secular Cantata No. 2 setting Walt Whitman's poetry, and went on to write eight symphonies along with an opera about baseball, The Mighty Casey, reflecting a lifelong devotion to the game. As president of Juilliard from 1945 to 1961 he founded the Juilliard String Quartet, then led Lincoln Center through the 1960s — a rare case of a major composer also running the institutions that trained and housed the next generation.