George Walker, the first African-American composer to win a Pulitzer Prize, dies

George Walker had always thought of himself as a pianist, not a composer. Born in Washington, he was the first black graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and in 1945 made his professional debut in a solo recital at New York’s Town Hall.

By his telling, it was the first time a black instrumentalist had performed at the venue—a milestone that he replicated two weeks later, when he became the first black instrumentalist to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

“It was then,” he later told the New York Times, “I discovered the stigma of race.”

Dr. Walker, who died Aug. 23 at 96, at a hospital in Montclair, New Jersey, 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 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 in music, for his song cycle “Lilacs,” set to stanzas from Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

“There is wonderful music in this cycle, which is profoundly responsive to the images in the text—you can hear the sway of lilacs in the rhythm, smell their fragrance in the harmony,” wrote Boston Globe music critic Richard Dyer, after the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered the work in 1996.

A former chairman of the music department at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Walker composed dozens of works for orchestras and chamber groups, including sonatas, concertos, sinfonias, string quartets and a Mass. 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.

In an email, George Lewis, a Columbia University professor of American music, wrote that Walker’s music “was all about freedom. His compositions adhered to no school, and did not develop from a singular, iconic style. Each work proceeded from its own premises and found its own way.”

That freedom “to draw from any source,” he added, “was critical to the emergence of a later generation of African-American composers,” including Alvin Singleton, Anthony Davis, Courtney Bryan and Muhal Richard Abrams.

George Walker was born in Washington, D.C., on June 27, 1922. His father was a physician who emigrated from Kingston, Jamaica, and saw patients at the family home; his mother worked for what was then the Government Printing Office. Neither could play the piano, but after they bought one for the parlor, their 5-year-old son began pounding on the keys.

“Enough is enough,” Walker recalled his mother saying. “I’m going to find a teacher for you.” In time, Walker accompanied her as she sang spirituals and folk songs at home in the evenings, sometimes playing 50 hymns in one night. His younger sister, Frances Walker-Slocum, also became a pianist and was the first black woman to receive tenure at Oberlin College. She died in June.

A precocious student, he graduated from Dunbar High School at 14 and then from Oberlin College in Ohio at 18. He graduated from Curtis in 1945, and in 1956 became the first African American to receive a doctorate from the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music.

By then, he had begun to immerse himself in composing, and traveled to Paris to study under Nadia Boulanger, who counted Aaron Copland as a former pupil. He began his own teaching career in 1960, and taught at the New School for Social Research in New York and at Smith College in Massachusetts, where he taught from 1969 until his retirement in 1992.

His marriage to Helen Siemens ended in divorce. In addition to his son Gregory Walker of Louisville, Colorado, who said Walker was suffering from a kidney ailment, survivors include his son Ian Walker, a playwright in Oakland, California; and three grandsons.

Walker’s orchestral works were performed by groups including the New York Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestra. He released piano recordings on Albany Records, and in 1997, Mayor Marion Barry even proclaimed a George Walker Day in the District of Columbia.