George Walker

Breaking colour barriers with his elegant and intellectually rigorous musical style, George Walker wrote nearly 100 works and achieved many firsts. He was the first African-American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize for music (in 1996, for his Walt Whitman song cycle, Lilacs, the first Black recipient of a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music and the first Black pianist to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Walker (b. 1922) began piano lessons with his mother at age five and studied piano at several leading music schools: the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Curtis Institute of Music and Eastman. Although his time with Rudolf Serkin at Curtis led to some important debuts—including a recital at New York’s Town Hall in 1945—Walker struggled to get concert bookings, a predicament he attributed to his race. In the 1960s he turned to teaching, and held several academic posts, including at Smith College (1961-68) and Rutgers University (1969-92). His music is often marked by a crisp angularity and percussiveness, evident in such mid-period works as his Piano Sonata No. 3 (1975, rev. 1996) and String Quartet No. 2 (1967). His most performed piece is the Lyric for Strings (originally Lament, 1946), a lush tribute to his grandmother, while his final statement is also an elegy: Sinfonia No. 5, “Visions” (2016), is dedicated to the victims of a church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. Walker died in 2018 at age 96.