Father & Son: George Walker was a trailblazing and multitalented composer and pianist of the 20th Century. Among his many accomplishments he was the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. He passed away in 2018, but his legacy continues in his son composer and performer Gregory T.S. Walker. As a performer Gregory regularly tackles his father’s momentous works for violin, and the interview with conductor Devin Patrick Hughes highlights the interplay and the complex relationship between composer and performer, father and son.
Devin Patrick Hughes: I am here with Gregory T.S. Walker, part of a musical dynasty that started in 1922 with the birth of one of the great American composers, George Walker. Gregory, I'd love to just start by getting into your collaborations that you've done with your dad. You've done his sonatas for violin and piano, yourself as the violinist, him on the piano, and also more recently, you premiered his violin concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Can you just talk about what it is like to collaborate on such a scale with your father?
Gregory T.S. Walker: Going back to the experience at the time, the main impression I was left with and I think a few musicians who have performed his music would be able to sympathize with this, is just the challenge, the overwhelming complexity one has to feel with it. We can think of it in terms of a collaboration because father son, why not, it appears plausible. But there are artists like my father who are rugged individualists, and the collaborative aspect probably was just limited to him listening to me play and realizing that he made mistakes with certain things. On the other hand, my father would routinely, and to the horror of his publisher, revise music long after it’d been released. But it was established pretty clearly early on that I would receive this. And my main contribution, my main achievement was to do whatever he asked. And there are some interviews where he alludes to that, and he seems to be grateful that I didn't give him any flack. That didn't matter how insane a passage was, that unlike other players, you know, accomplished players, but they you know, wouldn't it be easier if we do this, that as a dutiful son, I would just impale myself upon these difficulties.
So you can kind of imagine that it was a musical relationship that was exciting with something that was just a crucible for me to make it through, especially with some of the higher profile venues we eventually reached, and some of the technical difficulties involved with his music and the interpretive insights that I keep searching for were plumbed at the time, some of them years after his death, I'm still trying to solve and I guess I wouldn't really have it any other way because in that sense, he's still alive for me.
I saw somewhere, that in terms of revisions, he purposefully did not share with you drafts or any early parts of the composition. So once you had it, it would be very clear that this was the final product, and nothing not was open to change. You probably know the relationship with Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim. Brahms would send all of his scores to also Clara Schumann and Joachim, especially the violin concerto, and, of course, Joachim and Clara and for instance Elisabeth Von Herzogenberg, they would come back with feedback and all these suggestions and Brahms would never accept any of it. So I'm curious, was there some give and take? I know your dad was old school, but most composers these days are working hand in hand with their soloist, for the most part. I'm thinking of Hilary Hahn and Jennifer Higdon, for example. Was there a back and forth?
Yes, there's definitely a logic to that approach. You end up with a product that's more idiomatic, it lies under the fingers more conveniently, and sometimes the composer's learning something. An accomplished soloist should have some insights into the instrument of what makes it sing and what makes it more virtuosic that almost any non string player composer could benefit from. But, I guess we could politely say that dad was just a little more of a purist than that. He had an absolute vision and the vision was actually not something that was set in stone. So just when you think it's tricky enough as it is to have a complex piece of music that was not written by a string player and that you have to negotiate, it's like a Himalayan mountain that's not really meant to be climbed. You have to find the route. And players like myself, would go through that process, including the falls, the metaphorical death and performance to be able to figure things out. But then I can think of a couple of examples of when, you know, a day or two before a big performance, you know, maybe in Philadelphia was just one example, he would decide that he wanted to change some notes. And one of the things that is fairly old school about his aesthetic, is just like he had seen growing up through the Golden Era, some people call it a classical music with some of the great virtuosos of the 1940s and 50s, how there was such an emphasis on the soloist that they all, just as a point of departure, would memorize and present everything as if they were the sovereign interpreter. So it was that, unlike you usually see in contemporary music, his preference for memorized performances was clear to those who are close enough to him. So, all to say that one's getting ready for a premiere, one is just crunching numbers, trying to remember what's going on with the Byzantine collection of notes, and then he decides within 24 hours to switch something right before that, and you don’t want to lose your grip on the mountain. So that was something that it was just a trip to just stay focused and survive some of these performances. Of course, in performance, you're not wanting to give that impression. The idea is that somehow, and the obligation is even more pronounced with contemporary music: not only do you want to acquit yourself of the technical challenges, but you're trying to communicate this music that might not even want to be communicated. And so there were some heights I felt I needed to scale that really, I think, not only left me as the artist I am today with things that I compose, things that I perform, but I think as Nietzsche would tell us, “just things that did not kill us made us stronger.”
Let's move to some of your more recent works. Just a few pieces we’ve collaborated on inlcude uneasy sits the king, Dream Catcher, dream n the hood, Song of the Untouchable, and Glitch for cyber guitar and orchestra. That’s just a small but highly representative aspect of your work. Can you talk about how that differs or follows the trajectory of the musical legacy that you're carrying on from your father, or rebels in some ways?
Well, clearly just the technique to compose music is something that was influenced by his output. I had to go to different universities and study with different teachers. But the fingerprints of certain aspects of his approach are there in ways that he would have recognized. And you also have to also combine that with the reality that because he had a very purist approach to music and it was something that he drew from old Masters who preceded him and wanted to preserve and explore in an unaltered way. What that means is, almost any of the music that you mention above was not going to sit well with them.
The most colorful instance of that was there was one time when he was a member of this illustrious American Academy of Arts and Letters, all the top composers, writers and artists you can think of, Pulitzer Prize winners, are all members of this august institution. Every year, this institution breaks off into committees and creates various competitions for exorbitant prize money pots and there was one year when I decided that I would submit some music to this competition and he was aware of what I was writing. I would always run it by him, even though usually it would be met by a certain cricket like silence. And it made its way through the various levels. And finally, the final committee was trying to figure out whether this was going to win the big Charles Ives scholarship, and ordinarily he would have been part of that committee, but when people realized that the applicant was his son, he was sent to another part of the building, and these men labored over this and finally decided to give me the prize. And when he reported to me, you could just hear how stunned he was. He just didn't understand why I would get it.
Do you remember what the piece was?
Oh, yeah. Microphone for Amplified Orchestra. It was something that an orchestra in this area known as the Timberline Symphony.
Ah yes, I've heard great things about them.
And immediately after they did, the Colorado Symphony, did a suite from this ten movement work, and then the Detroit Symphony played some of it. And what I submitted was actually, because I think I needed all ten movements, some movements from Detroit, some movements from Colorado Symphony, and some movements from the Timberline Orchestra.
The other competitors were composers whose names you wouldn't recognize who are submitting their own works performed by major symphonies. Also, I had a Violin Sonata that was part of that package. So it was something that was, you know, had strong experimental aspects, to be sure. Not quite as wild as some of the things you and I have done together. And nobody would take it personally in our family. I wasn't traumatized by the fact that he really didn't have any particular appreciation for what I was composing, because just as he was the man that you had to accept, if you're going to work with him, almost any other prominent composer who's alive today or in the latter part of the 20th century, post Stravinsky, had a lot of problems for him. They were very unsatisfying for him. So I was in good company.
Well, and that's the great thing about symphonic music: there's something for everybody.
Yeah. And, you know, I think some people would just assume if you’ve got a creative individual, a composer, a writer, that the wonderful thing about these people is that they can create, they can produce something out of nothing. I would argue, most of us folks who consider ourselves creative, are sculpting down from something that already exists virtually in our imagination. And I mentioned that now because in a sense that took that to a logical extreme. You cut away all these things. It's all about what you don't want: you cut away, cut away, cut away. And then what you have left is your art.