George Walker was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. George Theophilus Walker was born June 27, 1922 in Washington, D.C., the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance. His mother worked at the Government Printing Office in Washington, and his father was a respected physician who owned his own medical practice. His parents believed in the importance of education. During the summers, Walker’s mother organized math and English lessons for the children in their neighborhood. On occasion, Walker’s parents provided financial support for students at Howard University who were faced with financial difficulties. His mother started him off with piano lessons at age five.
He studied piano throughout his childhood. Already at an early age, still attending Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., his mother enrolled him into the Junior Department of Music at Howard University, where classical music was the focus. Walker was assigned to study classical piano with Lillian Mitchell, who so emphasized playing the correct notes and rhythms of a composition that Walker never had the opportunity to perform an entire piano piece from beginning to end. At 14, Walker gave his first public recital at Howard University. He would also find early employment as a musician during church services. While attending the segregated Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, Walker had the opportunity to perform at school assemblies. He played piano pieces such as "Majesty of the Deep" by George Hamer and "Juba Dance" by Nathaniel Dett.
Turning down a scholarship to Howard University itself, he chose instead to study away from home. His piano instructor, Mitchell, suggested that he apply to Oberlin College. He won a four-year scholarship to Oberlin, covering tuition, room, and board. It was with the initial intention of becoming a concert pianist that in 1937 Walker entered Oberlin Conservatory. He was the only African American in his conservatory class and the youngest student in the entire school. While attending Oberlin, Walker had to adjust to practicing four hours a day instead of the half hour he was accustomed to during high school. His minor concentration was organ, an instrument he had never studied before. During his junior year, he served as the organist for the Oberlin Theological Seminary.
After discontinuing his composition lessons, he composed his first solo piano work, "Danse Exotique," which was retitled "Caprice" before its publication. During his time there, he was exposed to some of the great pianists of the age, including Rachmaninov. He saw him perform live in 1938 in ‘a memorable concert’ that left a great impression. Oberlin also offered him his first performance opportunities, and at his senior recital he played Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with the conservatory orchestra, receiving a standing ovation from the packed house. Studying composition with Normand Lockwood, he also wrote his first pieces, the Caprice for piano and Responses for voice and piano. Walker obtained a bachelor of music degree in performance from Oberlin in 1941.
George then enrolled at the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. At the Curtis Institute he studied piano with Rudolf Serkin and composition with Samuel Barber. In 1944, Walker had enough credits to graduate but decided to remain at the Curtis Institute another year to continue studying repertoire with Serkin. In 1945, Walker made his concert debut in a recital at Town Hall in New York. He graduated in 1945, becoming its first African American student to graduate. Walker seemed destined for a fine career at the keyboard. He won acclaim with his Town Hall debut in New York in 1945 and was the first Black musician to play there. That was followed by another debut where he played the 3rd Piano Concerto of Rachmaninoff with the Philadelphia Orchestra with Eugene Ormandy conducting. Yet, despite these successes, progress proved tough, due to his race.
In 1946 George Walker composed his String Quartet no. 1. The second movement of this work, entitled, Lyric for Strings, has become the most frequently performed orchestral work by a living American composer. Walker traveled to Europe to study and perform. He studied in France with Robert Casadesus at the American School in Fontainebleu in the summer of 1947. Later that year, he returned to Washington, DC, with hopes of performing in the United States. In 1950, he finally secured management with National Concert Artists, the first Black instrumentalist to be signed to a major management company. Engagements still proved elusive, though, even when the concerts he did play met with acclaim. He toured America and Europe as a soloist into the 1950s.
In 1953, Walker presented two poorly received recitals at Town Hall. Because Black classical singers had more opportunities in Europe than they did in the United States, Walker desired to present a concert tour of Europe. His concerts in cities such as Stockholm, Amsterdam, Milan, and London were well received. However, he had to discontinue his concert tour when he developed an ulcer. He subsequently found that even his European success did not help him secure bookings in the United States, where it was especially difficult to market a Black classical artist. Upon returning to the United States, he taught at Dillard University in New Orleans for one year. He continued his studies at the Eastman School of Music in New York where he received a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree in 1956. He became the first African American recipient of a doctoral degree from that institution.
In 1957 he returned to Europe and spent two years furthering his compositional studies with famed pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, credited as the 20th century’s most famous music pedagogue for having taught Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and Philip Glass, among others. He toured as a performer in Europe again in 1959. During this period, his presence as a Black man on the classical stage surely held curiosity value, but his performances did not create the opportunities he'd hoped for or as tours did for others. However, it was through his work as a pianist and subsequently as a composer that the African American presence in classical music began to seem unexceptional. In 1960 George Walker married the Canadian pianist and musicologist Helen Siemens, a devoted champion of Black composers. In the early 1960s, health problems related to the stress of touring brought a temporary end to his piano career.
During this hiatus, Walker shifted his focus to a long and distinguished teaching career. His academic appointments include professorships at Smith College in Massachusetts, the University of Colorado, and the University of Delaware where he held the first Minority Chair at that institution. In 1968 Walker was part of a Rockefeller Foundation symposium for African American composers, which raised awareness of his work in the classical community. His career as a composer progressed more smoothly from that point, and he created works for both orchestras and smaller ensembles. Despite his background as a pianist, many of his works were dominated by strings, which he was naturally drawn to. It was in 1971, just short of his 50th birthday, that Walker gained his first recording contract.
Walker performed several of his own piano works including Sonata No. 2, Spatials and Spektra. In addition, Natalie Hinderas recorded his First Piano Sonata, and further fame came in 1973 with the Black Composer Series. Walker was becoming well-established with a steady stream of commissions that would continue throughout the rest of his life. In 1975, the National Endowment of the Arts commissioned his Piano Concerto. That same year, he was appointed Chair of the Music Department, Rutgers University-Newark. He became a Distinguished Professor there in 1976 and retired from its faculty in 1992. He continued his work in composition throughout his life, receiving commissions from such major orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, and by orchestras throughout the world. Walker's first major orchestral work was the Address for Orchestra. His Lyric for Strings is his most performed orchestral work.
In a compositional career highlighted by many honors, in 1996 Walker became the first African American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize for music, for his Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra - a work for soprano or tenor and orchestra, commissioned by the Boston Symphony, Seiji Ozawa conducting.. Based on a text by Walt Whitman’s poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d" in memory of the death of Abraham Lincoln, "Lilacs" was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The piece, written for voice and orchestra, was Walker’s seventieth published work. Prior to that distinction, his "Dialogus for Cello and Orchestra" nominated by the Cleveland Orchestra for the Pulitzer Prize in 1977 after its premiere, was the only finalist in this competition.
Over his career, Walker published over 90 works including sonatas for piano, a mass cantata, songs, organ pieces, choral works, sonatas for cello, violin and viola, and works for brass and woodwinds. "I believe that music is above race," Walker once said, and his own music does not strongly position him as an African American composer. In 1998, he received the Composers Award from the Lancaster Symphony and the letter of Distinction from the American Music Center for "his significant contributions to the field of contemporary American Music". He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. The following year, George Walker became the first living composer to be inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. Walker published an autobiography, Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist, in 2009. He died at the age of ninety-six on August 23, 2018, in Montclair, New Jersey.