The image of Walker, who died last summer at the age of 96, was captured by photographer and filmmaker Frank Schramm, a close friend. They had known each other since Schramm heard a broadcast of Walker’s Sinfonia No. 3 in 2004 and, he said, “immediately gravitated to his work.”
Living within a couple of miles of Walker in New Jersey, Schramm would pay regular visits to his house in Montclair — helping out with errands and at the same time using his camera to document his life and work, right up to the end.
“George was 81 when I met him, so there was already a sense of time running out,” Schramm said. “But he was so focused. We would listen to and discuss music. It became like an unsolicited master class for me.”
Just two months before his death, Walker had been keenly anticipating the opportunity to experience Sinfonia No. 5, “Visions,” in a concert hall, Schramm recalled. He was looking forward to the first live performance, which will be given by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra on Thursday. (A studio recording, made in 2017, is available on Albany Records.)
The piece, which was completed in 2016, in part conveys Walker’s response to the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. “He looked back and saw the other work he had done and thought this could be the last one,” said Gregory Walker, the older of Walker’s two sons. “And he felt an urgency about getting it out there.”
“Visions” crowns a long career in which Walker produced more than 90 compositions, including intimate pieces for solo piano (his primary instrument) and large-scale orchestral and choral works. It was the last score he completed; at the time of his death, he had embarked on a piece commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Amid impassioned debates about the canon and its exclusion of historically marginalized voices, his remarkably individual and intricately crafted musical voice is long overdue for discovery.
“George was very proficient,” Schramm said. “His house became his think tank, with his work at the center. He knew what he had.” But it was frustrating, he added, for Walker to repeatedly face difficulty in getting orchestras to program his work.
A longtime passionate advocate has been Peter Kermani, a former chairman of what is now the League of American Orchestras and the founder of Albany Records. In the mid-1980s, when he first encountered Walker’s music, he was attracted to “the lack of sweetness and treacle that a lot of American works had.”
“Right from the beginning, that was a distinguishing feature of George’s music,” Kermani added. “I think he was breaking new ground. I felt he should be given every opportunity on the planet to get his music performed and heard.”
The Seattle Symphony’s performance may signal the beginning of a fresh wave of interest. In 2016, Schramm recalled, Walker was encouraged by a meeting with conductor Simon Rattle, who expressed interest in performing his music in Europe. Walker’s early “Lyric for Strings” became his first piece to be programmed at the BBC Proms when the Chineke! Orchestra performed it shortly after his death last year.
During the past two decades, Kermani has released a multivolume series of Walker’s orchestral works on the Albany label, along with albums documenting the composer’s earlier career as a concert pianist. He introduced Walker to English-born conductor and pianist Ian Hobson, a specialist in mid-20th-century American orchestral music who had made numerous recordings with the Sinfonia Varsovia of Poland.
Hobson described Walker as “a composer of great integrity: uncompromising in the best sense of the word, who doesn’t pander to anything.”
While still trying to place “Visions” with an orchestra, Walker arranged to have it recorded by Hobson and the Sinfonia Varsovia — the final installment of Hobson’s cycle of his sinfonias, each of which is a compact, single-movement composition. (“Visions,” with a duration of about 18 minutes, is the longest of them.)
“Visions,” Hobson said, is “complex and built of small cells of harmonic patterns and melodic groupings,” adding that “sometimes the detail is knotty and gnarly — and deliberately so — and sometimes unexpected beauties emerge from his extremely sensitive ear for color.”
Walker’s son Gregory — a teacher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a former concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra — said that the piece, which includes spoken text, is striking for the ground it breaks in orchestral writing.
“He wasn’t worried about whether it would be comprehensible immediately,” Gregory Walker said. “It’s an idealistic vision of what this combination of music and text and imagery could achieve.”
George Walker was born in 1922, into an arts-loving family in Washington. His father, an immigrant from Jamaica, ran a medical practice from their home and organized his own research groups with colleagues. (At the time, the American Medical Association didn’t grant membership to black doctors.) His mother, a singer, encouraged his precocious talent for music with piano lessons — and did the same for his younger sister, Frances Walker-Slocum, who became the first black woman granted tenure at Oberlin College.
George Walker started attending Oberlin at 14, focusing on piano and organ before beginning graduate studies at the Curtis Institute of Music. He envisioned a career as a concert pianist and made his debut in 1945 at Town Hall in New York, as the first black instrumental soloist there. A few weeks later, he achieved the same milestone with the Philadelphia Orchestra as the soloist in Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto.
Despite critical acclaim, Walker was able to secure only a fraction of the number of engagements that came readily to his white peers. He turned instead to an academic career, while at the same time channeling his creative drive into composition.
To improve his keyboard skills at Curtis, he undertook composition studies. (The title of his memoir, “Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist,” reflects how fundamental both identities remained for him.) Walker studied with storied mentor Rosario Scalero, who also taught Samuel Barber, and spent a period in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. She encouraged him, and with a new focus on composition, he cultivated a distinctively laconic style purged of excess and meticulously designed from meaningful gestures.
In 1996, Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for “Lilacs,” a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra that set portions of Walt Whitman’s Lincoln elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” But the recognition that came with that and other honors did not erase his experience of struggling to get his music heard by the public.
Responding to The New York Times about the Pulitzer news, Walker revealed the boldly self-reliant attitude he had used to cope with the constant institutional roadblock of racism: “I strongly felt if I continued to press for what I hoped to achieve, I would achieve it.”
Being the first black composer to win the music Pulitzer became something of a double-edged sword. Invariably, like a Homeric epithet, it has become the phrase regularly used to introduce him as a composer.
“He has been advertised as this African-American statesman who is supposed to be representing all the potential that has been neglected in the black community,” Gregory Walker said, “yet doesn’t follow the trends or fit cleanly into any category of contemporary music.”
George Walker’s guiding philosophy, his son added, was that everyone is an individual, and his music was “proof of how individual things can be.”
“He saw himself as an extension of great artists of the past, using their compositional techniques, idioms, instruments and aesthetics — and his love of Beethoven and romantic-era composers,” Gregory Walker said. “He transformed all of that into something that was himself.”
Not a programmatic composer by inclination, Walker began work on “Visions” before the Charleston massacre occurred. But, when he learned what had happened, he became determined to introduce a layer that pays tribute to the victims. Brief, elliptical texts he wrote are assigned to five solo speakers; even though they are not sung parts, the score specifies their approximate ranges (a soprano, a tenor, two baritones and a bass).
Along with these textual elements, the music includes several brief — and, in typical fashion, rather hidden — quotations from famous songs like “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes” and “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” as well as the hymn “Rock of Ages” and the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”).
The texts are elusive, acquiring disquieting ambiguity when juxtaposed with a video that Schramm created at Walker’s request. The video, which begins about midway through “Visions,” contains images of ocean scenes filmed on the Atlantic coast along with close-ups of photographs documenting the slave trade in Charleston.
“It emphasizes the mystery that this was the same ocean that brought the slaves over,” Schramm said, “and of the past, present and future of the water, which is very dark.”
During what turned out to be Walker’s final year, Elena Dubinets, the vice president of artistic planning and creative projects at the Seattle Symphony, came across interviews in which he had discussed “Visions.” When arrangements for the premiere elsewhere fell through, she expressed interest in having it in Seattle.
She found a place for the piece on a program with Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, conducted by the orchestra’s new music director, Thomas Dausgaard.
“We wanted to juxtapose two very different views on our country,” Dubinets said, “a romanticized European perspective on the American culture combining different worlds into a new one that suited Euro-American colonizers, and an internal perspective coming from an African-American composer terrified by the shocking massacre in Charleston more than 120 years later.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.