George Walker

Lyric for Strings

For most of a century, despite the systemic pervasive racism he encountered, George Theophilus Walker sustained three successful careers in performance, composition, and teaching. After graduating from Oberlin Conservatory, Walker attended the Curtis Institute, becoming the first Black student to earn an Artist’s Diploma in piano and composition. At Curtis, Walker studied piano with Rudolf Serkin and composition with Gian Carlo Menotti. Walker continued his education at the Eastman School of Music, where he earned a D.M.A. in composition, the first Black composer to do so. In the 1950s, Walker traveled to Paris to study composition with the influential composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.

Walker’s life list of accomplishments includes many more “firsts:” he was the first Black instrumentalist to play a recital in New York’s Town Hall; the first Black soloist to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, and the first Black instrumentalist to obtain major concert management, with National Concert Artists. In 1996, Walker became the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra, a setting of Walt Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In 2000, Walker was elected to the American Classical Music Hall of Fame, the first living composer so honored.

Like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Walker’s Lyric for Strings – initially titled Lament for Strings – began as a movement for string quartet. Walker wrote his String Quartet No. 1 in 1946 as a graduate student at the Curtis Institute. He dedicated the Lament to his grandmother, who had died the previous year. The quartet premiered on a live radio performance of Curtis’ student orchestra in 1946, and the following year received its concert premiere at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Walker subsequently gave the second movement a new title, Lyric for Strings, and as a stand-alone piece, it quickly became one of the most regularly programmed works by a living composer. Melodies interweave among the instruments, and the pensive atmosphere reflects both the composer’s anguish at the passing of his beloved grandmother, as well as the joy her memory evokes. The serene melodies and lush harmonic underpinnings suggest an expressive but never mawkish sense of love and loss.

© Elizabeth Schwartz

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