GEORGE WALKER (1922-2018) LYRIC FOR STRINGS (1946) Scored for: string orchestra Performance time: 6 minutes First Grant Park Orchestra performance: This is the first Festival performance of Lyric for Strings George Theophilus Walker was one of the great American composers of the 20th century with a career that spanned almost seven decades and more than 90 published compositions, including concertos, sonatas, quartets, vocal, and orchestral works. One of Walker’s later compositions, Lilacs, earned the composer the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1996, making him the first African American to receive the award. As an undeniable trailblazer, he was a man of many firsts: The first Black student to graduate from the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music, the first Black instrumentalist to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the first Black person to graduate with a Doctorate from the Eastman School of Music, and so on. Yet these firsts did not guarantee that George Walker’s breadth of exquisite artistic contributions to the Classical music canon would be duly acknowledged and celebrated, and most importantly performed on stages in the US and beyond with any consistency. This begs the question, what does it mean to break a barrier? Can artists, in any field at any time, truly break a barrier that they did not create? Or can they only crack its surface? Regardless of any answer, one place of no barriers was the artistry and imagination of George T. Walker. Walker began studying the piano at five years old in his hometown of Washington, D.C. By the time he graduated high school at 14, he had decided to become a concert pianist—a steadfast dream during an era when opportunities and access for Black musicians in the broader classical field and society were severely restricted, regardless of quality, talent, or artistry. Determined to become a solo pianist, Walker went on to study piano at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Decades later, his equally gifted younger sister, pianist Frances Walker-Slocum, would hold a position on the piano faculty at Oberlin Conservatory. After graduating with honors from there, George Walker enrolled at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in 1945. Despite Walker’s education at the finest conservatories in the country, and a European tour in 1954, he found that growing a career as an African American concert pianist difficult. In an 1982 interview with The New York Times, he said “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.” But there remained another outlet for Walker’s musical prowess. “I had so much energy,” he recalled, “that I wanted to do something else after spending hours practicing at the keyboard!” And so, Walker also studied composition at Curtis. In 1946, he began composing his first string quartet. As he was working on the second movement, he received news of his grandmother’s passing. The second movement was completed with the title “Lament”, and was revised for string orchestra in 1990 under the title Lyric for Strings. In this piece, Walker creates an experience of intimate tenderness. The emotional arc of the piece is reverent and expansive with moments of hope in the midst of mourning.
©2021 Danielle Taylor
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