George Walker
Curtis Institute of Music:
Curtis alumnus George Walker’s Lyric for Strings was
performed by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra on April 29, and he received
the President's Alumni Award at Commencement in May. Fellow alumnus
William Short (Bassoon '10) asked Mr. Walker about his Curtis memories.
Evening lessons with Rudolf Serkin in a room “so dark you could
hardly see the keys.” The Common Room, “so elegant, and so removed from
all the things that one knew existed—bigotry even in churches, and in
the restaurants—but when you walked in there, it was so peaceful and so
elegant.”
Into this evocative environment entered the young
George Walker (Piano and Composition ’45), who after graduating from the
Curtis Institute of Music would become a Pulitzer Prize-winning
composer, pianist, and advocate for social justice. His latest work,
Sinfonia No. 5, deals with the 2015 Charleston church massacre; the
National Symphony will premiere it in the 2019–20 season.
Initially admitted alongside longtime friend Seymour Lipkin (Piano
’47) as a piano student of Rudolf Serkin, George soon found himself
unable to expend his seemingly boundless energy solely through
piano-related pursuits: “I needed to do more than practice five hours a
day.” He began to study composition with the legendary Rosario Scalero,
whose insistence on starting every one of his students with the
fundamentals of counterpoint fascinated George. “The more linear aspects
of writing,” while not necessarily of interest to every composer of his
generation, were definitely of interest to him. He made it his goal “to
infuse what I do with some of these elements which are considered
archaic,” but to use them “so that they don’t seem academic.”
Impressively
for a man who, in addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, has been
awarded seven honorary doctorates (including one from Curtis, in 1997)
and two Guggenheim Fellowships and has been inducted into the American
Classical Music Hall of Fame, among numerous other accolades, George’s
most earnest desire is “just to have people hear my music. That’s all I
want.”
—William Short (10), principal bassoon of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
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