George Walker, first African American composer to win Pulitzer Prize, dies at 96

Dr. Walker, who died Aug. 23 at 96, at a hospital in Montclair, N.J., found limited success as a concert pianist, despite early critical acclaim and support from leading pianists such as Rudolf Serkin, his instructor at Curtis. He said he faced racial discrimination — “a pressure-resistant stone wall” — from managers, talent agencies and orchestras who passed over him for white performers. At the same time, he suffered agonizing stomach pain, ulcer attacks that left him hospitalized for as long as a month. Yet Dr. Walker went on to establish himself as a revered composer, a pathbreaking music teacher and a powerful critic of racial discrimination in classical music. In 1996, he became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, for his song cycle “Lilacs,” set to stanzas from Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Note — on looking this up — it’s a long poem in free verse, written in 1865. It is an elegy for Lincoln, though he is not mentioned by name in the poem.

One of his best-known works was also his earliest: “Lyric for Strings,”which was written in 1946 as the second movement of his first string quartet. The piece was inspired by the death of his grandmother, a former slave.

With mixed success, he sought to be viewed simply as a pianist-composer, without a racial label attached. When he did begin alluding to jazz standards and spirituals in his work — after attending a 1968 music symposium in Atlanta, where he said he met another black orchestral composer for the first time — he buried the references in atonal pieces that utilized complex time signatures and nontraditional chord progressions.

“He took these simple, elemental melodies and abstracted them so that only someone who knows what to listen for can perceive they’re buried in the fabric of the music,” said his son Gregory Walker, a violinist and former concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra in Colorado. “You could think of that as a metaphor for his life. There he is working in this white, classical European idiom and mastering it. But he has a grandmother who was a slave, and is part of [African American] culture.”

Photo from Washington Post — taken in 1996