George Walker
(Photography by Frank Schramm)
George Walker Composing
He occupies more than one slot in the pantheon of American music. Along with breaking through the race barrier multiple times, as a piano virtuoso and as a composer, George Walker continues to sustain a creative life in his 90s that is of a very rare order—one reminiscent of Elliott Carter and Henri Dutilleux. Just before celebrating his 95th birthday in June, Walker shares his thoughts about a richly productive life.
By Thomas May
When he published his memoirs in 2009, George Theophilus Walker chose the title Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist.
It was at the keyboard that he first formed his musical identity,
starting when he was five. Precocious musically and intellectually,
Walker graduated from high school at 14 and in the yearbook announced
his intention to become a concert pianist—which is precisely what he
proceeded to do, in characteristic Walker fashion. With unwavering
determination, he initially focused on his career as a performer.
“I come from a family of pianists,”
Walker points out during a recent conversation from his home in
Montclair, New Jersey. Born in 1922, he grew up in an arts-loving
household in Washington, DC. His father, a Jamaican immigrant, had
arrived in the United States with just a few dollars but became a
respected physician who taught himself piano for enjoyment; his highly
musical mother watched over George’s first lessons. Frances
Walker-Slocum, his sister (now 93), also became a professional pianist
and a professor of the instrument at the Oberlin Conservatory, from
which George graduated at the age of 18, having concentrated on piano
and organ.
When Walker began studying composition in
graduate school at the Curtis Institute, it wasn’t so much an end in
itself as it was a secondary activity. “I had so much energy that I
wanted to do something else after spending hours practicing at the
keyboard!” Walker recalls. He also believed learning the secrets of
composing would help hone his interpretive skills performing the classic
repertoire.
Just two weeks after Walker’s debut at
New York’s Town Hall in 1945, he appeared as the soloist in
Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra
under Eugene Ormandy. He was later signed to National Concert Artists, a
dominant management company at the time. All of these were first-time
achievements for an African-American instrumentalist. Walker’s
musicianship earned positive reviews, and he undertook an extensive
European tour in 1954, during which he continued to win more acclaim.
Yet coveted performance opportunities remained frustratingly scarce. In a 1982 interview with the New York Times
just before the premiere of his Cello Concerto (a New York Philharmonic
commission), Walker lamented that “those successes were meaningless,
because without the sustained effect of follow-up concerts my career had
no momentum. And because I was black, I couldn’t get either major or
minor dates.” He noted that fellow white students at Curtis “were
assured of 25 to 30 concerts a season, but I was lucky if I got seven.
It was like being excommunicated from society. I was unwanted.’’
Eventually, despairing that his musical
life was at a dead end, Walker found himself compelled to divert his
extraordinary gifts from performance into the realm of teaching. And,
little by little, into writing his own music. In the process, Walker
gradually added a varied and challenging catalogue of work that has made
him a genuine American cultural treasure. Now, at age 95, he
additionally belongs to the rarefied ranks of composers who remain
creatively active at an advanced age.
Though he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1996 for Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra—a
magnificent, densely textured setting of the poetry of Walt
Whitman—much of Walker’s output remains unjustly neglected. A great
place to start exploring his work is his array of compositions for
strings. “I never played a string instrument, but somehow strings have
always fascinated me,” remarks Walker. “I can’t explain why that is.”
That perspective may explain something of
the originality of this composer’s extensive writing for strings. Among
these works are solo, chamber, and orchestral scores (the concertante
pieces have been commissioned by such first-class ensembles as the New
York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra): Bleu for unaccompanied violin, two quartets, a pair of violin-piano sonatas, violin and cello concertos, Poeme for violin and orchestra, Dialogus
for cello and orchestra, a viola sonata, and a cello sonata. “I always
wanted to write something for each of the string instruments,” says
Walker, though the double bass remains a challenge he has yet to cross
off his bucket list: “I find the instrument is too easily covered by the
orchestra.”
“In playing his Cello Sonata, you’re
engulfed in a state of beauty and episodic turmoil,” observes Seth
Parker Woods, a maverick American cellist and performance artist who is a
rising star of the young generation. “One of the things I love is that
its amazing melodic lines fit perfectly in the hand, as if they were
molded all along for a cellist. It’s a brilliant work that I really
would love to see more and more younger and older cellists performing.
George Walker’s music is of monumental status and importance.” Woods is
also a member of the UK-based Chineke! Orchestra, which is on the BBC
Proms roster this summer with a program that will include Lyric for Strings, Walker’s most frequently performed work.
“In playing his Cello Sonata, you’re engulfed in a state of beauty and episodic turmoil.”—Seth Parker Woods, cellist
In fact, Lyric originates from a string quartet.
Walker wrote it as a very young man, in 1946—when he still identified
above all as a pianist, and before he had begun to remake himself as a
composer. It began as the brief, profoundly moving second movement
(Molto Adagio) of his String Quartet No. 1. Walker made this into an
independent piece for string orchestra, à la Adagio for Strings by
Samuel Barber, who had also been taught at the Curtis Institute by the
violinist-composer Rosario Scalero, one of Walker’s most formative
mentors.
As a student of piano and composition at
Curtis, Walker took lessons from Rudolf Serkin, violist William
Primrose, and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Scalero in particular
imprinted on him a work ethic and a sense of rigor and discipline that
have guided him ever since. “Composers today don’t have teachers who
believe in the same way in the importance of studying counterpoint and
the elements of skill. But I think you need to absorb and understand
what other composers have done in the past before you can set about
changing and creating something new. What will represent your own voice
will come out.” He emphasizes his advice to young composers: “Listen to
lots of music.” He’s an unabashed advocated of the “canon,” of “pieces
that have achieved a certain status such that you don’t have to question
their quality, so the task becomes to understand what it is that makes
up that quality.”
As his graduation piece, Walker wrote a
sonata for violin and piano he decided to disown—even though the
hard-to-please Scalero had liked it. Then, soon after his Town Hall
debut that year (in 1945), “for some reason, in my early 20s, I was
determined to write a string quartet. I had just written the first
movement and was starting the second when I learned that my grandmother
had died,” Walker recalls. The string orchestra version of the Adagio,
dedicated to her memory, received its premiere via radio broadcast,
under the title Lament.
Family connections have played a crucial role in Walker’s creative work throughout his career. He dedicated his 1991 Poeme—the
revised version of an earlier violin concerto that is “by no means a
tranquil piece”—to his mother, and his Violin Concerto (2008) is a
late-period masterpiece whose impetus was a father’s love and admiration
for his son. With his former wife, the music historian Helen
Walker-Hill (1936–2013), Walker had two sons who both became artists.
Ian Walker is a playwright, actor, and director based in San Francisco
(he authored Dutch, about the famous art forger Han van
Meegeren); older brother Gregory Walker followed more directly in his
father’s footsteps and pursued a career as a musician, but chose the
violin in lieu of the family tradition of piano.
“Gregory really had no aptitude for the
piano, but then he discovered the violin and became fascinated,” Walker
remembers. After studying with Yuval Yaron, a pupil of Heifetz, Gregory
Walker went on to become concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic
Orchestra. He teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder (where
Walker was a visiting professor in 1968) and has also become involved in
the realm of electronic music and video art as well. Walker composed
the Violin Concerto “in secret” to present as a gift, hoping to give his
son’s career a major boost.
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Thanks, Bill. George George Walker
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