George Walker

Although he began as an extremely promising concert pianist within a grand design (a few of his most prominent concerts included concertos by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, and Brahms), George Walker was writing substantial music from his mid-twenties. By enough time he was 40, he previously solidly set up himself being a versatile, fully modern composer which is on his huge catalog of functions produced from the first ’50s to about 1990 that his popularity will rest. He researched piano through years as a child, going to get degrees in overall performance from Oberlin (bachelor of music, 1941) as well as the Eastman College of Music (doctor of musical arts, 1957). He also analyzed in the Curtis Institute and with Nadia Boulanger in the American Conservatory, Fontainbleau. His educators included Rudolf Serkin; Robert Casadesus; Mieczyslaw Horszowski; and in chamber music, Gregor Piatigorsky and William Primrose. Walker appeared destined for an excellent career in the key pad. He received acclaim along with his City Hall debut in NY in 1945 and was the 1st dark musician to try out there. Also that 12 months, he was the 1st BLACK instrumentalist to earn the Philadelphia Orchestra auditions, which resulted in a efficiency of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with this orchestra and Eugene Ormandy. He toured America and European countries being a soloist through the 1950s. During this time period, his presence being a dark man in the traditional stage surely kept curiosity value, nonetheless it was through his are a pianist and eventually being a composer the fact that African American existence in traditional music begun to appear unexceptional. Through the mid-’50s, his teaching profession included brief stints at different schools and long-term affiliations with Smith University (1961 – 1968) and Rutgers College or university (1969 – 1992, including 2 yrs chairing the music section). “I really believe that music is certainly above competition,” Walker once stated, and his very own music will not highly placement him as an BLACK composer. His older design grafts serialism onto neo-Classical forms, binding both with complicated rhythms, Hindemithian counterpoint, solid timbral contrasts, and periodic evocations of dark folk music through mention of blues, spirituals, and jazz. He received the Pulitzer Reward (the 1st living dark composer to take action) in 1996 for Lilacs, a function for soprano or tenor and orchestra, commissioned from the Boston Symphony. Although he was an adept orchestrator, his recognized masterpiece is perfect for single piano: the 1956 Sonata No. 2, created as his doctoral dissertation for Eastman. It’s a brief work that presents Walker’s desire for traditional forms (variants on a floor bass, sonatina), while insinuating a jazzy syncopation in to the scherzo. It isn’t an entirely quality function, though, in its pretty conservative tranquility. The same could be stated of his most broadly noticed orchestral piece, the Lyric for Strings, a 1946 transcription of the next motion of his String Quartet No. 1. Two better types of Walker’s mature tone of voice time from 1975: Piano Sonata No. 3 and Music for Brass (Sacred and Profane). Both are angular functions reflecting Walker’s desire for sonority. His even more populist but nonetheless dissonant mode is certainly well-represented by 1990’s Folk Tracks for Orchestra.