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 highlights 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: Well, clearly an unforgettable, definitive experience for me. After surviving all the challenges associated with that, I feel as if I’m a different person than I was before. And after his passing, it’s something that I feel holds us together. I feel his presence now with the music that’s still in my life on a daily basis. We had our big premieres and concerts and recordings together over the past couple of decades. But even today, I’m still kind of working his music, the memory of it, into my daily routine. Every year, every season, I perform it someplace in the world. So it’s got to be ready to go. And that makes it feel as for me, I’m still with him.
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.