George Walker
(Frank Schramm/Jay Nordlinger)
John Malveaux of
sends this link:
By Jay Nordlinger
May 15, 2017 Issue
Montclair, N.J. — George Walker greets me at the door,
smiling and dapper. I figured he would be (dapper). Mr. Walker is a
gentleman of the old school. I’ve never seen a photo of him when he
wasn’t wearing a coat and tie. He is dressed that way now, in his own
home. I have a feeling he wouldn’t welcome a guest any other way.
We are in Montclair, N.J., a town some 15 miles from Manhattan. “I’ve
lived in this house since 1969,” Mr. Walker says. “I was the first black
person in this neighborhood.” I ask whether he ever had any problems.
No, he says.
Mr. Walker has many “firsts” to his credit. He was the first black
person to graduate from the Curtis Institute of Music, the famous
conservatory in Philadelphia. He was the first black person to earn a
doctorate at the Eastman School of Music, the famous conservatory in
Rochester, N.Y. He was the first black person to win the Pulitzer Prize
for Music. And so on.
Obviously, Walker is a musician — a composer and pianist. That’s the
right order, too. You can see it in the title of his autobiography
(2009): “George Walker: Reminiscences of an American Composer and
Pianist.” There is something else about the title: the word “American,”
unqualified.
“I feel strongly about that,” Mr. Walker tells me. “I’ve always
disliked being called ‘African-American.’” As he elaborates on this, he
points out that his music is dotted with American tunes: hymns,
spirituals, pop standards, and the like. You may not hear them — they
are planted in this classical music. But they’re there.
This summer, Mr. Walker will mark his 95th birthday. His latest
composition is his Sinfonia No. 5. It will be played by the National
Symphony Orchestra, in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the 2018–19
season. Mr. Walker spends much of his time doing three things: seeking
commissions; seeking performances; and seeking recordings. That is the
lot of a composer.
Speaking of D.C., he was born and raised there. When he was born — in
June 1922 — Warren G. Harding was president. Mr. Walker’s father,
also named George, had come from Jamaica. He was a doctor: a graduate of
Temple University’s medical school, in Philadelphia. Mr. Walker’s
mother, Rosa, was American-born and a high-school graduate. She worked
at the Government Printing Office.
Both Walkers observed standards. They did not even use slang. Not even “okay,” which was spreading like a weed.
Mr. Walker knew his grandmother — his mother’s mother — very well.
Her name was Malvina King. She had had two husbands. She lost the first
one when he was sold at auction. The second had died. Mrs. King herself
was an escapee from slavery. One day, young George asked her about it —
the experience of slavery. She said one thing: “They did everything
except eat us.”
In 1946, Mr. Walker composed Lyric for Strings, his best-known piece. It is dedicated to his grandmother.
He went to Dunbar High, the famous school in Washington — the most
famous high school for blacks in all of America. It produced a who’s who
of people, including Edward Brooke, the first black senator (popularly
elected). Mr. Walker says that some of the teachers at Dunbar were very
good; and some were not so good. He really valued his classmates.
One teacher he unquestionably valued was Clyde McDuffie, who taught
Latin. They spent one year — fourth-year Latin — on the Aeneid.
Mr. Walker can still recite the famous opening: “Arma virumque cano . .
.” Also, the poem impressed on him the importance of duty above
personal desire.
He graduated from Dunbar at 14. Did his father pressure him to follow
in his footsteps as a doctor? Not at all. “He never brought up the
subject.” Young George would be a musician. He went to Oberlin College
in Ohio, which had been admitting blacks for a hundred years. George was
the youngest student in the college, 15.
At Oberlin, he heard many of the greatest musicians of the day,
including Rachmaninoff. He also heard Horowitz. “He was a pianist who
made me aware of what the piano could do,” says Mr. Walker. He was not
always on. Like many of us, Mr. Walker heard him great and heard him
shockingly bad. But when he was on — there was hardly anything else
like it.
There was another pianist at Oberlin, by the way: Frances Walker. Mr.
Walker’s younger sister. Later, she would be a teacher on the same
campus, the first black woman to become a full professor at Oberlin. She
still lives there.
From Oberlin, Mr. Walker went to Curtis, where one of his teachers was
Rudolf Serkin, a major pianist. Mr. Walker remembers everything Serkin
said. But he did not say much. And he did not know some of the scores,
says Mr. Walker, as well as he thought he did. For composition, Walker
had Rosario Scalero, who had also taught Barber.
One day, Samuel Barber returned to the school in his uniform: the
uniform of the Army Air Corps. He served Wednesday tea with Mrs. Bok,
the founder of the school.
Walker had an orchestration class with Gian Carlo Menotti. “It was a
joke,” he says. I respond, “He didn’t give you much?” Mr. Walker says,
“He didn’t give us anything.” Walker pretty much taught himself orchestration.
He is nothing if not blunt in his opinions. At one point, we’re talking about Kreisleriana,
the Schumann piece. “If you listen to that pianist from South America,”
he says, rubbing his eyes in disgust. The object of his disgust, he
cannot remember the name of. “Martha Argerich?” I hazard. He nods his
head. “Terrible,” he says. “Terrible. She has no idea about the piece at
all. No sense of the rhythm, no sense of the phrasing . . .”
In 1945, Walker played Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 with the
Philadelphia Orchestra, under Eugene Ormandy. The maestro was not very
nice to very many people. “Was he nice to you?” I ask. No. Ormandy should at least get points for consistency.
Warmly supportive of young Walker was Nadia Boulanger, the famous
composition teacher in France. She had taught anyone and everyone,
including a slew of Americans: Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Aaron
Copland, Elliott Carter. She taught Walker, too. “You’re a composer,”
she told him — a high compliment, from that source. She confirmed for
him that he was on the right track. “Just keep going,” she said.
In the middle of the century, and for a long time thereafter, there was
tremendous pressure on composers to conform to a modernist fashion: a
fashion epitomized by Pierre Boulez, the famous Frenchman. Did Walker
ever feel such pressure? “No,” he says. “I’m an outsider. I don’t have
connections to composers. Even black composers.”
I ask him who, among his colleagues, is underrated. He cannot give me
an answer. I ask who is overrated. He says, emphatically, “Boulez.”
Walker had a busy career of teaching, along with composing and playing.
He taught at several institutions, mainly Rutgers, in New Jersey, where
he was chairman of the music department. In 1996, he wrote Lilacs,
for voice and orchestra (setting Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in
the Dooryard Bloom’d”). It was this work that won him the Pulitzer
Prize. Since its premiere, it has barely been performed at all. This is
tremendously frustrating for a composer, Pulitzer or no Pulitzer.
Mr. Walker was married to a fellow pianist, Helen Walker-Hill. They had
two sons, Gregory and Ian. Mr. Walker’s father kept mum about medicine.
What about Mr. Walker? Was he laissez-faire with his sons? No.
“I’m the micromanager!” he says. Gregory is a violinist; Ian is a
playwright. Gregory is a champion of his father’s music, including a
violin concerto, written for him.
