• June 27, 1922 – George Walker is born in Washington, DC.
• 1936 – Walker graduates from Dunbar High School; Walker presents his first public recital at Howard University’s Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel.
• 1937 – Walker is admitted to Oberlin College as a scholarship student, studying piano with David Moyer and organ with Arthur Poiser.
• 1939 – Walker serves as organist for the Graduate School of Theology of Oberlin College.
• 1940 – Walker graduates from Oberlin with the highest honors of his Conservatory class.
• 1940 – Walker is admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music, studying piano with Rudolf Serkin, chamber music with William Primrose and Gregor Piatigorsky, and composition with Rosario Scalero, teacher of Samuel Barber.
• 1945 – Walker becomes the first Black graduate of the Curtis Institute, the first Black instrumentalist to perform in New York’s Town Hall, and the first Black instrumentalist to solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
• 1946 – Walker performs the 2^nd Piano Concerto of Brahms with the Baltimore Symphony; He composes String Quartet no. 1. The second movement of this piece, now entitled Lyric for Strings, later becomes the most frequently performed orchestral work by a living African American composer.
• 1950 – Walker becomes the first Black instrumentalist to be signed by a major management company, the National Concert Artists.
• 1954 – Walker embarks upon a seven-country European tour of Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and England.
• 1955 – Walker teaches at Dillard University in New Orleans.
• 1956 – Walker becomes the first Black recipient of a doctorate degree from Eastman School of Music.
• 1957 – Walker is awarded both a Fulbright Fellowship and the inaugural John Hay Whitney Fellowship.
• 1957-1959 – Walker studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
• 1959 – Walker tours France, Holland and Italy.
• 1960 – Walker obtains faculty appointments to the Dalcroze School of Music, and The New School for Social Research.
• 1961-1968 – Walker becomes the first Black tenured faculty member at Smith College.
• 1963 – Walker receives an honorary membership in the Frederic Chopin Society in London.
• 1968-1969 – Walker receives a faculty appointment to University of Colorado as Visiting Professor. Walker receives a Guggenheim Fellowship.
• 1969-1992 – Walker teaches at Rutgers University, serving as Chair of the music department.
• 1971-1972 – Walker receives two Rockefeller Fellowships.
• 1975-1978 – Walker teaches at the Peabody Institute.
• 1975-1976 – Walker teaches at University of Delaware, as recipient of the first Distinguished Minority Chair. Walker receives a third Rockefeller Fellowship.
• 1982 – Walker receives an honorary doctorate degree from Lafayette College.
• 1983 – Walker receives an honorary doctorate degree from Oberlin College.
• 1987 – Walker receives a second Guggenheim Fellowship.
• 1988 – Walker receives a Koussevitsky Fellowship.
• 1996 – Walker becomes the first Black composer to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Music, for Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra.
• June 17, 1996 – George Walker Day is proclaimed in Washington, DC.
• 1996 – Walker receives the University Medal from the University of Rochester.
• 1997 – Walker is awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Montclair State University, Bloomfield College, Curtis Institute of Music.
• 1998 – Walker receives the Composers Award from the Lancaster Symphony, and the Letter of Distinction from the American Music Center. Walker receives a second Koussevitsky Fellowship.
• 1999 – Walker is elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters.
• 2000 – Walker is inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame; Walker receives the Dorothy Maynor Outstanding Arts Citizen Award from the Harlem School of Arts.
• 2001 – Walker is awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Spelman College; Walker receives the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s inaugural Classical Roots Award for a lifetime of achievement in American Music.
• 2002 – Walker is awarded the annual A.I. Dupont Award presented by the Delaware Symphony.
• 2005 – Walker receives a commission from the Eastman School of Music with Foils (Homage to Saint George) for Orchestra; Walker is named Honorary President of Ebb and Flow Arts in Maui, Hawaii; The Borough President of Brooklyn, NY designates April 6, 2005 as “A Celebration for Dr. George Walker”; Albany Records releases a 60^th Anniversary Retrospective featuring the Liszt Piano Sonata played by George Walker.
• 2007 – Walker receives the annual Legacy Award from the National Opera Association.
• 2009 – Scarecrow Press releases “Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist,” an autobiography; The Philadelphia Orchestra gives the New York premiere of Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra in Carnegie Hall as part of Jessye Norman’s “Honor” concert series; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra receives its world premiere with soloist Gregory Walker.
• 2010 – KUSC FM in Los Angeles presents a five-hour program of the music of George Walker.
• 2011 – Walker becomes the first Black composer to be performed at the Cabrillo Festival.
• 2012 – Walker’s Sinfonia No. 4 receives its premiere in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and is also performed by the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and National Symphony Orchestras; Walker delivers the Commencement Address at the Eastman School of Music and receives a Doctor of Music Degree; Walker receives the Aaron Copland Award from ASCAP.
• 2013 – The National Symphony Orchestra performs Walker’s Lyric for Strings on a series of sixteen Young People’s Concerts; Walker’s Movements for Cello and Orchestra receives its premiere by the Sinfonia da Camera conducted by Ian Hobson at the University of Illinois.
• August 23, 2018 – George Walker passes away in Monclair, NJ.

“I've always thought in universal terms, not just what is Black, or what is American, but simply what has quality,” George Walker said in an interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday in 2012.  British critic Tom Service, writing in The Guardian in 2015, cited Hindemith and Stravinsky as two of Walker's “musical heroes,” but stressed that the American composer “has created a distinctive world that is modernist and multifaceted yet richly communicative.” 

This distinguished composer, pianist, and educator, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral song cycle Lilacs in 1996, published a fascinating memoir in which he recounted a lifetime of successes and honors and also spoke quite frankly about his musical likes and dislikes.  He had studied piano with Rudolf Serkin and composition with Samuel Barber’s teacher Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and first made his name with the often-performed Lyric for Strings, a creative response to Barber’s Adagio for Strings.  His importance as a pianist is best illustrated by the fact that he performed Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.  As a composer, he always remained true to his classical roots and built an oeuvre of symphonic and chamber works that earned him the esteem not only of the profession but of a wide audience as well.

Between 1984 and 2016, Walker composed five Sinfonias (all five will be performed by the NSO during the current season and the next).  The first of these, commissioned by the Fromm Foundation, was premiered by the Berkshire Music Center Orchestra under Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood on August 1, 1984.  It is a compact work in two movements, in which moments of great energy and powerful outbursts alternate with calm, lyrical sections.  There are massive, block-like chords for the brass and wild percussion passages, but also sensitive violin solos and agitated outbursts for the clarinet and the flute, among others.  In turn dramatic and tender, the work covers a  lot of emotional ground in just over ten minutes, and ends with a climactic statement for the entire orchestra.

Armed with a fresh doctorate in composition from the Eastman School of Music, 35-year-old George Walker travelled to Paris to receive the final polish from Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), one of the greatest composition teachers in the 20th century.  Boulanger had taught many of the most prominent American composers since the 1920s, when she worked with a young Aaron Copland.  In her classes and private lessons, she insisted on compositional technique, and set the highest standards in harmony and counterpoint.  A close friend of Igor Stravinsky's, Boulanger was a proponent of neo-classicism and gave her students a thorough grounding in early music, which she championed throughout most of her seventy-year teaching career.

At the time, Walker already had one of his most successful works, Lyric for Strings (1946) under his belt.  He had also spent a summer at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau a decade earlier.  Yet this time he stayed in France for two years, receiving much encouragement from Boulanger.  It was around this time that he composed his First Violin Sonata, in which he went considerably beyond the Romanticism of his earlier music.  (Walker had written an early violin sonata as his graduation piece from the Curtis Institute in 1943, but he withdrew it from his catalog.  Many years later, in 1979, he composed a Second Violin Sonata.)

The 1958 work bears traces of Walker's experiences at the “Boulangerie,” as this exceptional musical workshop was affectionately called by the lucky participants.  It is a compact, ten-minute composition in a single movement, subdivided into numerous sections with changing moods and tempos.  A quiet opening meditation is followed by a fugato, or section in imitative counterpoint, that soon dissolves in a series of vigorous ostinatos, or “obstinately” repeated rhythmic figures.  Then the tempo slows down again, in preparation for the agitated central portion of the sonata, which places high technical demands on both players.  As a total contrast, the violin subsequently starts an emotional solo melody in freely flowing, irregular rhythm, with only occasional interjections from the piano.  The slow, deliberate final section that ends the sonata sounds like a solemn proclamation.

George Walker celebrated the year of his ninetieth birthday with the premiere of a brand-new work, Sinfonia No. 4 (‟Strands”).  The commission came from a consortium of orchestras, including the NSO, the Cincinnati, New Jersey and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras, with a grant from Meet the Composer, and was premiered by the New Jersey Symphony in March 2012 under Jacques Lacombe.

The subtitle refers to the “strands” from two spirituals, “There is a Balm in Gilead” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll” that the composer wove into the fabric of his composition.  Walker's use of these quotes is rather subtle and somewhat reminiscent of the way Charles Ives worked with church hymns in many of his works:the melodies are fragmented, transformed, and hinted at more than presented in full. Their “strands” are integrated into a rhythmically vibrant and colorfully orchestrated one-movement work, projecting high energy and constant excitement.

Commenting on his piece, Walker offered the following pointers:

The Sinfonia begins with an introduction that consists of several sections before the principal theme is stated.  This theme recurs several times.  The quotation of the first spiritual provides a pensive relief from the proclamatory nature of the theme that precedes it.

The briefer snippet of the second spiritual is affirmative.  The following section consists of a melodic bass line over which fragmented interjections are superimposed.  A similar section recurs, combining with the opening phrase of the second spiritual played by the piano during the course of the work.  The bass material appears briefly in the coda.

Beethoven’s career as a composer spanned some 40 years, from his youthful essays to the last string quartets.  His output, however, was not evenly distributed over those decades.  There were years when he composed little or nothing at all; at other times he wrote incredible amounts of great music over a remarkably short period of time.  During such periods, it is hard to reconcile Beethoven’s extreme speed with the usual image of the composer toiling endlessly over his sketches.

1806 was one of the most prolific years in Beethoven’s life.  He completed his three Razumovsky quartets, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Fourth Symphony, and the Violin Concerto.  He also started work on what would later become the Fifth Symphony (actually, the C-minor work had been begun first, and then laid aside in favor of the symphony in B flat).

The 36-year-old Beethoven was in the middle of his so-called “heroic” period, shortly after the “Eroica” and just before the no-less-heroic Fifth.  The Fourth has traditionally been seen as a kind of respite between these two mighty works, in accordance with the old theory that opposed the dramatic “odd-numbered” symphonies to the more lyrical “even-numbered” ones.

As an experiment, let us forget this theory for a moment.  We will then find that the Fourth is animated by the same incessant flow of energy and the same irresistible pull to move ahead as its more tempestuous companions.  It is just as perfect a representative of the “heroic period” as any other work.  The emotions expressed may be lighter and less tragic, but they are expressed with the same force throughout.

The slow introduction to the first movement is certainly one of the most suspenseful Beethoven ever wrote.  The idea of starting a B-flat-major symphony with a slow-moving unison theme in B-flat minor may have come from Haydn’s Symphony No. 98, but the polarity is much greater in Beethoven, whose introduction is full of a sense of mystery that was entirely new in music.  One finds it hard to believe that Haydn had written his London symphonies only a decade earlier and was still alive in 1806!

Slow introductions are usually linked to the subsequent Allegros by means of some transition that builds a bridge between the two tempos.  In Beethoven’s Fourth, there is a clear separation instead of a bridge.  A drastic shift of keys and a sudden general rest bring the music to a virtual standstill before the energetic Allegro vivace is launched.  Now there will hardly be a moment of pause until the end of the movement.  The concise exposition begins with a brisk and vibrant theme, and even the more lyrical moments are full of motion and excitement.

The development section employs one of Beethoven’s favorite musical techniques, namely thematic fragmentation.  The first theme is “decomposed” almost to its atoms; for a while, it receives a new lyrical counter-melody that is, however, soon brushed aside by a tutti outburst.  The recapitulation is prepared by a long tremolo on the kettledrum, over which the strings gradually put the thematic “atoms” back together for the triumphant return of the theme.

The second movement is the only large-scale lyrical Adagio in a Beethoven symphony before the Ninth.  (The other symphonies’ slow movements are all faster, with the exception of the Funeral March of the Third.)  In the Fourth Symphony, Beethoven unfolds a beautiful cantabile (“singing”) theme over a characteristic rhythmic accompaniment that eventually rises to the status of a theme in its own right.  The cantabile theme returns several times, in a more and more ornamented form, its appearances separated by some rather powerful statements.  The movement ends with a timpani solo followed by two concluding orchestral chords.

The third movement is a scherzo, although Beethoven didn’t use that word as a title.  The music abounds in playful elements such as subtle interplays of duple and triple meter, sudden modulations (or, rather, jumps) into distant tonalities, and a general mood of exuberant joy.  The Trio moves in a slower tempo and has a simpler melody; it is based on the juxtaposition of the orchestra’s wind and string sections.  Beethoven added an interesting twist to the usual scherzo form here:  he expanded on the standard form (Scherzo - Trio - Scherzo) by means of a second appearance of the Trio and a third Scherzo statement (he was do the same in the Seventh Symphony).

The fourth-movement finale, marked “Allegro ma non troppo,” begins with a theme in perpetual sixteenth-note motion; the flow of the sixteenth is only briefly interrupted by melodic episodes.  This movement is light in tone and cheerful in spirit.  Like the slow introduction to the first movement, the finale also shows how much Beethoven had learned from Haydn (less during his brief apprenticeship with the older composer than from studying Haydn’s symphonies).  But, once again, most of the music sounds like no one but Beethoven.  The repeated und unresolved dissonances at the end of the exposition (duly brought back in the recapitulation) sound rather close to a similar passage in the first movement of the “Eroica.”  Also, Haydn probably wouldn’t have entrusted the return of the perpetual-motion theme to the solo bassoon, in what is one of the most difficult passages for the instrument in the classical repertoire.  In general, Haydn’s cheerfulness has been stepped up to a state of near-euphoria.  One feels that this music could go on ad infinitum, but it is suddenly cut short by a hesitant, slower rendition of the main theme in the violins, continued by the bassoons, and abruptly ended by a few energetic chords played by the whole orchestra.