{"id":371,"date":"2021-03-17T14:40:52","date_gmt":"2021-03-17T14:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/program_note\/lyric-strings\/"},"modified":"2025-04-02T20:04:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T20:04:08","slug":"lyric-strings","status":"publish","type":"program_note","link":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/program_note\/lyric-strings\/","title":{"rendered":"Lyric for Strings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An iconic figure among black American composers who worked in the classical field, Walker excelled marvelously in difficult times for men such as he.\u00a0 He was a native of Washington, DC, the son of a Jamaican immigrant. The first African-American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, he was educated at some of the most prestigious American schools:\u00a0 Oberlin, Eastman, Curtis, and the American Conservatory, Fontainebleau.\u00a0 Winner of Fulbright, Guggenheim, MacDowell, Whitney, and Rockefeller fellowships, he received commissions from outstanding orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.\u00a0 An accomplished pianist, he gave his debut recital at New York\u2019s Town Hall, and performed Rachmaninoff\u2019s 3<sup>rd<\/sup> Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra two weeks later\u2014an auspicious beginning of a performing career.\u00a0 Later, he toured Europe extensively.\u00a0 After receiving the first doctorate given to an African-American from the Eastman school, he taught at several universities, including the University of Colorado at Boulder.\u00a0 Honored, respected, and admired, he lived a long life, dying in 2018 at the age of ninety-six.<\/p>\n<p>His <em>\u0153uvre <\/em>includes over ninety compositions in most of the standard genres, but like some other composers, his very first effort was a smashing success.\u00a0 The String Quartet no. 1 (1946) achieved immediate recognition, and remained one of the most-performed works by a black composer.\u00a0\u00a0 Its musical nature and subsequent history bears somewhat of a similarity to Samuel Barber\u2019s evergreen <em>Adagio for Strings <\/em>(1936) in that both works were composed by young composers, sons of physicians in well-educated families; were originally the second (slow) movements in their respective first string quartets; and both works were recognized early on as wonderfully suited to performance by a full string orchestra.\u00a0 In the latter version, Walker later named his movement <em>Lyric for Strings<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The grief imbued in this work is not only in the mind of the listener, for Walker composed it with his deep feelings for his grandmother, who had passed away the previous year.\u00a0 He entitled the work first, <em>Lament<\/em>, before changing the title.\u00a0 While as a typical young post-war composer, he naturally explored a variety of musical styles, include the <em>avant-garde<\/em> fads of the time, he remained primarily a neo-romantic\u2014like his fellow Curtis graduate, Barber.\u00a0 And like Barber\u2019s famous <em>Adagio<\/em>, Walker\u2019s work is characterized by long spun out melodic lines that weave in and out with emotional sinuousness.\u00a0\u00a0 But, having observed that, it is pellucidly clear that this marvelous composition is completely George Walker\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n<p>\u00a92025 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[146],"class_list":["post-371","program_note","type-program_note","status-publish","hentry","program_note_tax-georgetwalker"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note\/371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/program_note"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}