George Walker

George Theophilus Walker was born on the twenty-seventh of June 1922 at Washington, D.C., the son of George Theophilus Walker Sr. — a Jamaican-born physician who had immigrated to the United States in 1898 — and Rosa King Walker, a homemaker and amateur pianist. He was raised in the Black professional Washington of the inter-war period at the Pleasant Plains district north-west of Howard University.

He gave his first public piano recital at fourteen at the Howard University Recital Hall in 1936. He entered the Oberlin Conservatory at fourteen on a full scholarship — at the time the youngest student in the conservatory’s history — and completed the bachelor’s with distinction in 1941 in piano performance under David Moyer.

He was admitted at nineteen in 1941 to the Curtis Institute of Music at Philadelphia in piano performance under Rudolf Serkin and in composition under Rosario Scalero and Gian Carlo Menotti, completing the Artist Diploma in 1945 — among the first Black graduates of the Curtis Institute.

He took the doctoral degree at the Eastman School of Music in 1957 under Howard Hanson — the first Black recipient of a doctorate in composition from Eastman — and the Fulbright Fellowship in 1957 to the École Normale de Musique at Paris under Nadia Boulanger.

He was appointed in 1969 chair of the music department of the Rutgers University at Newark, the position he held until his retirement in 1992.

He composed across the following sixty years over ninety works — five symphonies, four piano sonatas, two cello concertos, and the song cycle Lilacs (1996), on the Walt Whitman elegy When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa on the first of February 1996 at the Symphony Hall, Boston.

Lilacs was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in Music on the eighth of April 1996 — the first Pulitzer Prize in Music awarded to an African American composer.

He died at Montclair, New Jersey on the twenty-third of August 2018, at ninety-six.

He is honored here as the first African American Pulitzer Prize in Music.