Biography
George Walker launched his path as a concert pianist of grand ambition, appearing in major recitals that featured concertos by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and Brahms. From his mid-twenties onward he nevertheless produced substantial original scores, and by age 40 he stood as a versatile, fully contemporary composer whose reputation rests on the large body of works written from the early 1950s to roughly 2010.
Piano studies occupied his childhood and led to a Bachelor of Music in performance from Oberlin in 1941 and a Doctor of Musical Arts from the Eastman School of Music in 1957. He pursued further training at the Curtis Institute and with Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Fontainbleau. His teachers included Rudolf Serkin, Robert Casadesus, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, and, for chamber music, Gregor Piatigorsky and William Primrose.
Walker appeared headed for a distinguished keyboard career. Critical praise followed his 1945 Town Hall debut in New York, where he became the first black musician to perform. That year he also became the first African American instrumentalist to win the Philadelphia Orchestra auditions, which brought a performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. He toured America and Europe as a soloist into the 1950s. While his presence as a black artist on the classical stage carried curiosity value at the time, the engagements did not generate the sustained opportunities he sought or that tours opened for others. Still, through his dual activity as pianist and later composer, the African American presence in classical music gradually came to seem unexceptional. From the mid-1950s his teaching posts included short-term appointments at various colleges and longer affiliations with Smith College (1961–1968) and Rutgers University (1969–1992), where he chaired the music department for two years.
“I believe that music is above race,” Walker once said, and his own music does not strongly identify him as an African American composer. His mature idiom fuses serialism with neo-Classical forms, linking them through complex rhythms, Hindemithian counterpoint, sharp timbral contrasts, and occasional references to black folk music via blues, spirituals, and jazz. In 1996 he received the Pulitzer Prize—the first living black composer to do so—for Lilacs, a work for soprano or tenor and orchestra commissioned by the Boston Symphony.
Although he proved an able orchestrator, his acknowledged masterpiece is the 1956 Sonata No. 2 for solo piano, written as his Eastman doctoral dissertation. The compact score demonstrates his engagement with classical procedures—variations on a ground bass and a sonatina—while introducing jazzy syncopation into the scherzo. Its comparatively conservative harmony, however, distinguishes it from his typical language. The same holds for his most frequently heard orchestral piece, the Lyric for Strings, a 1946 transcription of the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1. Two clearer statements of his mature voice appeared in 1975: Piano Sonata No. 3 and Music for Brass (Sacred and Profane). Both are angular scores that reflect Walker’s interest in sonority. His more populist yet still dissonant manner is well illustrated by the 1990 Folk Songs for Orchestra.
Walker continued composing into his eighties while Albany Records documented a substantial portion of his œuvre before his death at age 96 in 2018.
Piano studies occupied his childhood and led to a Bachelor of Music in performance from Oberlin in 1941 and a Doctor of Musical Arts from the Eastman School of Music in 1957. He pursued further training at the Curtis Institute and with Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Fontainbleau. His teachers included Rudolf Serkin, Robert Casadesus, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, and, for chamber music, Gregor Piatigorsky and William Primrose.
Walker appeared headed for a distinguished keyboard career. Critical praise followed his 1945 Town Hall debut in New York, where he became the first black musician to perform. That year he also became the first African American instrumentalist to win the Philadelphia Orchestra auditions, which brought a performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. He toured America and Europe as a soloist into the 1950s. While his presence as a black artist on the classical stage carried curiosity value at the time, the engagements did not generate the sustained opportunities he sought or that tours opened for others. Still, through his dual activity as pianist and later composer, the African American presence in classical music gradually came to seem unexceptional. From the mid-1950s his teaching posts included short-term appointments at various colleges and longer affiliations with Smith College (1961–1968) and Rutgers University (1969–1992), where he chaired the music department for two years.
“I believe that music is above race,” Walker once said, and his own music does not strongly identify him as an African American composer. His mature idiom fuses serialism with neo-Classical forms, linking them through complex rhythms, Hindemithian counterpoint, sharp timbral contrasts, and occasional references to black folk music via blues, spirituals, and jazz. In 1996 he received the Pulitzer Prize—the first living black composer to do so—for Lilacs, a work for soprano or tenor and orchestra commissioned by the Boston Symphony.
Although he proved an able orchestrator, his acknowledged masterpiece is the 1956 Sonata No. 2 for solo piano, written as his Eastman doctoral dissertation. The compact score demonstrates his engagement with classical procedures—variations on a ground bass and a sonatina—while introducing jazzy syncopation into the scherzo. Its comparatively conservative harmony, however, distinguishes it from his typical language. The same holds for his most frequently heard orchestral piece, the Lyric for Strings, a 1946 transcription of the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1. Two clearer statements of his mature voice appeared in 1975: Piano Sonata No. 3 and Music for Brass (Sacred and Profane). Both are angular scores that reflect Walker’s interest in sonority. His more populist yet still dissonant manner is well illustrated by the 1990 Folk Songs for Orchestra.
Walker continued composing into his eighties while Albany Records documented a substantial portion of his œuvre before his death at age 96 in 2018.
Albums
