LYRIC FOR STRINGS
by George Walker (1922-2018)

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SHORTLY AFTER a piano appeared in his Washington D.C. home, George Walker, who was only five, discovered he could make curious sounds by pounding against the instrument’s shiny keys with his fists. The clanking noises that reverberated through the family’s living room quickly began to irritate his parents. At his mother’s urging, Walker started taking piano lessons and soon he was accompanying her as she sang spirituals and folksongs — some evenings for hours at a time. The son of a Jamaica-born physician and a government worker, Walker was a precocious talent who earned his undergraduate degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music at age 18 and, a few years later, in 1945, became the first African American graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music.

      With his sights set on a career as a concert pianist, he made his professional debut in a solo recital at New York’s Town Hall and, two weeks later, took the stage with the Philadelphia Orchestra for a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. “From the outset they explained that getting concerts for me — a Black pianist playing classical music — would be an uphill battle,” said Walker. “’We can’t sell you,’ they told me.” Eventually, he traveled to Paris to study under Nadia Boulanger, who had taught Aaron Copland, among others, and he gave a series of performances across Europe.

      As Walker struggled against “a pressure-resistant stone wall” of discrimination, as he called it, he began focusing his creative energies on composing and teaching. “I discovered that composing came extremely easily to me,” said Walker. “I could manipulate musical materials within the rules very quickly and get the maximum results.” He continued blazing new trails for African Americans in the world of classical music, hiding references to jazz standards and spirituals in atonal works that featured nontraditional chord progressions and complex time signatures.

      In 1968, he attended a music conference in Atlanta, and the event proved noteworthy because it was the first time he’d ever met another Black orchestral composer.

      In the years that followed, Walker would compose a varied collection of works that eventually totaled nearly a hundred. He rarely conformed to a specific style, drawing influence from folk songs, spirituals, jazz, church hymns, and the music of composers like Beethoven, Brahms, and Chopin. Among these was Dialogus for Cello and Orchestra, a work commissioned by The Cleveland Orchestra and premiered under the direction of Lorin Maazel at Severanace Hall in April 1976. Twenty years later, in 1996, Walker added to his list of groundbreaking achievements by becoming the first African American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize in music for his piece Lilacs — a song cycle set to stanzas from a poem by Walt Whitman.

      Walker’s best-known and most-performed work, Lyric for Strings, is also one of his earliest compositions. Written in 1946 when Walker was only 24 years old, Lyric for Strings was premiered during a radio concert performed by students of the Curtis Institute of Music under the title Lament — a work repurposed from the middle movement of an earlier string quartet and composed to honor the death of his grandmother, who was a former slave. The sound and structure of the piece were inspired by Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, colored by familiar hints of Romanticism. Lyric begins with sustained tones that set a mournful mood, eventually giving way to contrapuntal lines — a common practice by Walker — until they’re overtaken by a recurrence of soothing chords. The piece alternates between rich harmonies and solo pas-sages that highlight the breadth of sounds available across a string ensemble. As Lyric concludes, Walker revisits the quiet and somber tone he established at the start — this time with an underlying whisper of hope.

       Although Walker’s later compositions were more structurally complex, he
admitted that his melodic Lyric for Strings was intended to “pass the listener’s ears very easily.”

—program note by Michael Jaffe
    © The Cleveland Orchestra

Chamber Orchestra Presentation
Performed by members of The Cleveland Orchestra:

Jinyeong Jessica Lee, violin
Stephen Tavani, violin
Takako Masame, violin
Jeanne Preucil Rose, violin

Stephen Rose, violin
Ioana Missits, violin
Yun-Ting Lee, violin
Carolyn Warner, violin

Wesley Collins, viola
Lynne Ramsey, viola
Lisa Boyko, viola

Charles Bernard, cello
Martha Baldwin, cello
David Alan Harrell, cello

Maximilian Dimoff, bass