Alumni Gazette

Walker Premieres ‘Foils’

If he were interested in resting on his laurels, George Walker ’56E (DMA) could fill his days listening to concerts featuring his Lyric for Strings.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning composer estimates that the work for string orchestra is performed more than two dozen times a year by ensembles around the country.

While he’s proud of the piece, Walker has little interest in looking back.

“I never really wanted to make a career out of one work,” he says. “I’ve always tried to see what I could do in various genres.”

The latest example of Walker’s wide-ranging musical interests was the centerpiece of a special concert at the Eastman School last fall. His new composition, Foils for Orchestra (Hommage à Saint George), received its world premiere from the Eastman Philharmonia under the direction of Neil Varon, a professor of conducting and ensembles, during the Eastman School’s alumni weekend.

Commissioned by Eastman’s Hanson Institute for American Music, Foils for Orchestra marked the 50th anniversary of Walker’s connection to Rochester as an alumnus. And it marked the second time that the noted Eastman graduate has been asked to write a new work for his alma mater. Walker’s An Eastman Overture was premiered in 1983 by the Eastman Philharmonia at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts during the symphony’s tour through the Northeast.

The new composition added another signature work to a 60-year composing career that spans a broad spectrum of American classical music.

Walker’s honors and awards include Guggenheim, Whitney, and Fulbright fellowships and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2000, he was inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.

His Lilacs, a 16-minute work for voice and orchestra that draws its title from a poem by Walt Whitman, received the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for music, the first given to a black composer.

David Liptak, chair of the composing department at the Eastman School, says Walker is widely acknowledged as one of America’s most significant classical music composers.

“He’s worked very broadly in music of all sorts,” Liptak says. “The Pulitzer Prize is some proof of how highly thought of he is as a composer.”

A pianist whose talents were recognized as a young teenager, Walker became interested in composing while a student at Oberlin College. Planning to make his living as a concert pianist after graduation, he supported himself as a teacher and performer while also launching his career as a composer.

After studying at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, he enrolled at Eastman, where he was intrigued to learn that creative work would be accepted as part of his degree requirements. His Second Piano Sonata became his doctoral thesis and is now regarded as a masterpiece.

“It was a very fruitful period,” Walker says of his time at Eastman.

Since 1961, he has taught at Smith College, the University of Colorado, the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Delaware, and at Rutgers University, where he retired as chair of the music department in 1992.

From his New Jersey home he has maintained an active career as a composer, receiving commissions from orchestras across the country. In 2005, the Las Vegas Philharmonic debuted his composition, Hoopla (A Touch of Glee), to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Las Vegas.

Last November, Walker released George Walker: A 60th Anniversary Retrospective, a recording on the Albany Records label that features his performances of the classical repertoire as well as his compositions.

“That’s really how I like to think of myself—as a composer-pianist,” he says.

Widely recorded, Walker has a discography that extends over six decades. Among those recordings is one of his Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra by world-renowned trombonist Christian Lindberg. Considered a landmark work in the medium, the concerto was composed while Walker was an Eastman student and had its premiere under then director Howard Hanson.

Walker’s son, Gregory, a professor at the University of Colorado and concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic, has recorded Walker’s violin and piano sonatas with his father as well as Walker’s Poeme for Violin and Orchestra.

After winning the Pulitzer in 1996, Walker received considerable media attention as the first black composer to win the award, but he says he’s tried not to think of himself as a pioneer in that regard.

“I’ve had so many experiences being the first this or the first that that I never thought about it until much later in my career,” Walker says. “But it is important that a barrier has been breached.

“If it has offered some encouragement to black composers, that’s a good thing,” he says. “It’s no longer something that’s unreachable.”

Fans of his music may recognize elements in the new composition that Walker has explored in previous orchestral work, particularly harmonic usage and instrumentation. But, Walker notes, he was not interested in plowing old ground as he composed Foils for Orchestra.

“The title is ambiguous,” Walker says. “The music itself is full of musical and lyrical contrasts.”

He plans to continue such exploring through his music. As he was preparing for the Eastman premiere this fall, Walker was also working on another orchestral work.

“I regard music as part of an enormous span of Western culture,” he says. “My work is a continuation of that.”

—Scott Hauser