The Many Firsts of George Walker

The Minnesota Orchestra will open its May 15-16 concerts conducted by Edward Gardner with American composer George Walker’s Folksongs for Orchestra. In recent seasons, the Orchestra has programmed several of Walker’s works, including Lyric for Strings and Icarus in Orbit.  A recording of Folksongs will later be released on the Orchestra’s YouTube channel as part of the Listening Project, an initiative aimed at expanding the Orchestra’s knowledge of great orchestral works by historically underrepresented composers by performing and recording these scores—which in turn makes it easier for audiences and other orchestras to learn about this music as well. These performances are the Minnesota Orchestra premiere of Walker’s Folksongs.

George Walker – Folksongs for Orchestra

By the time of his death in August 2018 at age 96, Pulitzer Prize-winning pianist and composer George Walker had enjoyed a trailblazing career that lasted just over 80 years. Born into a family of pianists in Washington, D.C., in 1922, Walker began piano lessons at age five, gave his debut recital at 14 and was admitted to Oberlin Conservatory the same year. After studying piano and organ at Oberlin, Walker enrolled at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he studied piano with Rudolf Serkin and composition with Rosario Scalero.  

The year 1945 brought a trio of “firsts” that quietly broker barriers for generations of Black musicians after Walker: he was the first Black artist to give a recital at New York’s Town Hall, to solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra and to graduate from Curtis. But despite these firsts (and years of touring), Walker’s performance career languished due to his race. At the encouragement of his father, Walker decided to turn his full attention to teaching composition. After completing a Ph.D. at the Eastman School, he was accepted as a Fulbright Scholar to study further with Nadia Boulanger in Fontainebleau, France. Once back in America, Walker held posts at several universities, including Rutgers University, where he retired as professor emeritus in 1992.  

In 1996, Walker was the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, for his composition Lilacs. Despite breaking yet another barrier, Walker had complicated feelings about the recognition. “I’ve benefited from being a black composer in the sense that when there are symposiums given of music by black composers, I would get performances by orchestras that otherwise would not have done the works,” he said in a 1987 interview with broadcaster Bruce Duffie. “The other aspect, of course, is that if I were not black, I would have had a far wider dispersion of my music and more performances.”  

All told, Walker wrote over 90 works during his lifetime and was working intently on new music at the time of his passing.  

THE MUSIC 

Walker’s musical style is strongly rooted in western classical tradition and also draws influence from jazz and African American spirituals. His Folksongs for Orchestra is an orchestral setting of four traditional spirituals. Of this music, Walker writes that his intention was to “to set these melodies in an interesting way, in a respectful orchestral manner. They are wonderful melodies. The four spirituals are quoted intact, which is an unusual procedure for me, because I am much more in the habit of using only snippets from various sources [of] pop tunes or folk songs. The focus is to frame these melodies in a miniaturistic fashion; they should be easy for the listener to identify." 

Program note by Michael Divino.