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 third 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
Any composer as highly educated, sophisticated, and long-lived as Walker is bound to have explored many fundamental ways of creating music, and the variety of styles that he explored in his compositions bears out this truth.\u00a0 From simple, tuneful allusions to black music traditions to highly dissonant abstractions in the best manner of much of today\u2019s challenging musical art\u2014Walker cheerfully explored the limits.\u00a0 Composers, like all artists, reserve the right to communicate clearly with their audiences.\u00a0 Or, conversely, to entertain the most recondite techniques and inspirations for their art.\u00a0 They have no obligations. Tangents <\/em>is clear evidence of music whose internal structure, sound materials, and other generating elements are internal to the composer\u2019s mind, and not necessary easily apprehensible or clearly understood by the listener.\u00a0 These internal elements served the composer well in the act of creation, but are not necessarily important to the listener.\u00a0 With that in mind, look not for clear given meaning, but supply your own in this case.<\/p>\n Commissioned by the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, Ohio, to celebrate the turn of the millennium, the short one-movement composition has a first theme, a second theme, a diversion, and other familiar elements of musical form.\u00a0 But, they will not be easily followed.\u00a0 The putative second theme, the composer asserts is \u201cderived from a pop tune easily identified in its proper context.\u201d\u00a0 Good luck.\u00a0 Although, some suggest that it is a fragment of April in Paris. <\/em>Possibly.\u00a0 But it\u2019s good fun to look for it.\u00a0 There are bold, extremely dissonant sections, and others that almost seem tonal and pleasant.\u00a0 Dynamic, soaring gestures contrast with somewhat lyrical ones.\u00a0 Loud and soft, disjunct and smooth, traditional elements and the avant-garde<\/em>\u2014Tangents<\/em> is a study in all, aptly illustrative of its original working title, Juxtapostion<\/em>.\u00a0 Throughout, an easily appreciated element is Walker\u2019s complete mastery of eliciting a remarkable variety of textures and colors in the orchestra\u2014perhaps the best place to start in enjoying this remarkable composition by one of our outstanding twentieth-century American composers.<\/p>\n –Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n \u00a92020 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[146],"class_list":["post-393","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\/393","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=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}