George walker composer8/12/2023 Walker, is a violinist and composer, and their son Ian Walker is a playwright. His wife, Helen Walker-Hill, was a pianist and musicologist specializing in music composed by African American women. Walker's sister, Frances Walker-Slocum, was also a distinguished educator, pianist, and organist. Walker's father was a physician who had emigrated from the West Indies. George Theophilus Walker was born in Washington, D.C. He composed nearly 100 pieces in forms ranging from solo piano pieces and songs to concerti and symphonies and was also a respected music professor and pianist. Walker continued to compose throughout his 80s, while Albany Records worked to document a large portion of his œuvre before his death at the age of 96 in 2018.George Walker was one of America's most honored composers, having had his works performed by every major orchestra in the country, and was the first African-American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize for music. His more populist but still dissonant mode is well-represented by 1990's Folk Songs for Orchestra. Both are angular works reflecting Walker's fascination with sonority. 3 and Music for Brass (Sacred and Profane). Two better examples of Walker's mature voice date from 1975: Piano Sonata No. The same can be said of his most widely heard orchestral piece, the Lyric for Strings, a 1946 transcription of the second movement of his String Quartet No. It's not an entirely characteristic work, though, in its fairly conservative harmony. It's a short work that displays Walker's fascination with classical forms (variations on a ground bass, sonatina), while insinuating a jazzy syncopation into the scherzo. 2, written as his doctoral dissertation for Eastman. He won the Pulitzer Prize (the first living black composer to do so) in 1996 for Lilacs, a work for soprano or tenor and orchestra, commissioned by the Boston Symphony.Īlthough he was an adept orchestrator, his acknowledged masterpiece is for solo piano: the 1956 Sonata No. His mature style grafts serialism onto neo-Classical forms, binding the two with complex rhythms, Hindemithian counterpoint, strong timbral contrasts, and occasional evocations of black folk music through reference to blues, spirituals, and jazz. "I believe that music is above race," Walker once said, and his own music does not strongly position him as an African American composer. From the mid-'50s on, his teaching career included short stints at various colleges and long-term affiliations with Smith College (1961-1968) and Rutgers University (1969-1992, including two years chairing the music department). However, it was through his work as a pianist and subsequently as a composer that the African American presence in classical music began to seem unexceptional. During this period, his presence as a black man on the classical stage surely held curiosity value, but his performances did not create the opportunities he'd hoped for or as tours did for others. He toured America and Europe as a soloist into the '50s. 3 with that orchestra and Eugene Ormandy. Also that year, he was the first African American instrumentalist to win the Philadelphia Orchestra auditions, which led to a performance of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. He won acclaim with his Town Hall debut in New York in 1945 and was the first black musician to play there. Walker seemed destined for a fine career at the keyboard. His teachers included Rudolf Serkin Robert Casadesus Mieczyslaw Horszowski and in chamber music, Gregor Piatigorsky and William Primrose. He also studied at the Curtis Institute and with Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory, Fontainbleau. He studied piano throughout childhood, going on to obtain degrees in performance from Oberlin (Bachelor of music, 1941) and the Eastman School of Music (Doctor of musical arts, 1957). By the time he was 40, he had solidly established himself as a flexible, fully contemporary composer and it is on his large catalog of works produced from the early '50s to about 2010 that his reputation will rest. Although he started out as a highly promising concert pianist in a grand style (some of his most prominent concerts featured concertos by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and Brahms), George Walker was writing substantial music from his mid-twenties.
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