George Walker: A Snapshot

George Theophilus Walker (1922-2018) led a life of many “firsts.” In 1945, his list of achievements included becoming the first black student to receive the artist diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music; the first black instrumentalist to give a recital at the New York Town Hall and the first black soloist to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra in a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto (under Eugene Ormandy). Often thought of as his most significant achievement, in 1996 Walker was the first black composer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra, even though he acknowledged that “in providing me with more opportunities to be heard, the prize has been beneficial…but I was doing quite well before I received the Pulitzer Prize.”[1]

Beyond this impressive list of “firsts”, Walker also held teaching positions on faculties including the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, the University of Delaware (as the first Distinguished Minority Chair). In 1998 he received a Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for his “significant contributions to the field of contemporary American music”, and in 1999 he was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters. Now regarded as one of the most important American composers of the late twentieth-century, his oeuvre includes over 80 published works which include music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, chorus, piano, string quartet, voice, and organ.

“I have always regarded myself as a concert pianist. I have spent more time at the piano than I have composing…the piano has always been the instrument for which I have felt a real affinity and an instrument that provides me with great satisfaction”, remarked Walker in 2000.[2] Indeed, Walker’s career fits the nineteenth-century mould of the pianist-composer more accurately than that of the exalted late modernist composer. His five piano sonatas, written in 1953, 1956, 1975, 1984 and 2003 respectively, trace the considerable development of Walker’s compositional aesthetic and pianistic idiom, and all of which are of hitherto unrecognised value outside the somewhat rarefied canon of American piano literature.

The First Piano Sonata (1953), closest of all the sonatas in its formal structure to that of traditional sonata form, places an emphasis on quartal harmony—that is, the building of harmonic structures on the interval of a perfect fourth—and exhibits a clear fascination with learned compositional techniques found in early music (it is no coincidence that Walker was most often photographed in front of a manuscript of early Gregorian chant). Its second movement takes the form of a theme and variations on the Kentucky folk song “O Bury me Beneath the Willow” and is an extremely moving exploration of nostalgic Americana which can be found as a consistent theme throughout Walker’s compositional life.

In 1957, Walker was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study composition with Nadia Boulanger, arguably the most influential music pedagogue of the twentieth century, at the American School at Fontainebleau. By then, the achievements of his first two piano sonatas allowed him to be exempted from the exercises in harmony and counterpoint usually given to even her most talented students. “When I had my first meeting with her and showed her one of my songs,” remembered Walker, “she said ‘You are a composer’…I had composed two piano sonatas which I showed to her; she immediately recognized that I wasn't a student. The importance of my connection with her was that she was the very first person to acknowledge my ability as a composer and to express her confidence in it to me and to others. She also provided opportunities for my music to be played, which few Americans had done.”[3]

The reasons for Walker’s lack of support are obvious. “Racism is alive and well in classical music. Its legacy, which has affected society in general...There appears to be a systematic and exclusionary view of the importance and value of black composers' works by musicologists and music critics”, said Walker.[4] Even amidst his most profound successes, the baggage of racial prejudice loomed large; after being refused management from Columbia Artists, Walker eventually signed with the National Concert Artists, whose agents admitted that it would still be “difficult to sell” him as a black pianist.[5] His own family were attuned to the problem of race in the United States: Walker’s own grandmother had been a slave and once remarked to him how “they did everything but eat us”, the implications of which are horrifying beyond words. The composer’s most frequently played work, the Lyric for Strings (1946/1990), was written for her and completed shortly after her death.

Walker was an eloquent writer and frequently dealt with the topic of race in music: he regularly (and justifiably) accused the white musical establishment of myopia in disregarding the works of black composers. One passage is worth quoting at length: “The works of black composers whose music is not overtly jazz oriented or does not conjure up in its title some exotic connection to Africa does not conform to the ideas held by many whites, both musically literate and musically illiterate, about what is unique or individual. There is often a hostility—no longer latent but frequently expressed—as to what is viewed as an encroachment on musical territory that has been regarded as the highest expression of emotional and intellectual achievement, Western music. White composers are admired for the nuggets that they extract and exploit from black ghettos. When black composers distil the ofttimes doctrinaire techniques of twentieth-century icons, their music is labelled derivative.”[6]

The Pulitzer Prize-winning work Lilacs for voice and orchestra (also voice and piano) is a setting of the Walt Whitman poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, his great expression of grief at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.  "The unanimous choice of the Music Jury, this passionate, and very American, musical composition...has a beautiful and evocative lyrical quality using words of Walt Whitman.”[7]

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thoughts of him I love.

[1] Mickey Thomas Terry, Ingrid Monson and George Walker, “An Interivew with George Walker”, The Musical Quarterly , Autumn, 2000, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000), 384.

[2] Ibid., 379.

[3] Ibid., 378.

[4] Ibid., 380.

[5] Ibid., 377.

[6] William C. Banfield, George Walker, Musical Landscapes in Colour: Conversations with Black American Composers, (The Scarecrow Press Inc., Lanham, Maryland and Oxford, 2003), 93.

[7] Elizabeth A. Brennan, Elizabeth C. Clarage, Who's Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners (Oryx, 1999), 451.