Walker: Lyric for Strings
Malvina King must have been a remarkable woman. Born into slavery, she lost her first husband when their slaver sold him. Before long she herself escaped and made her way to freedom, and raised a large family in Washington D.C. She was also indirectly responsible for one of the greatest pieces of American string music: it was her death, and the epic and eventful life that preceded it, that inspired her grandson George Walker’s Lyric for Strings.
Walker’s long and illustrious career may have been foretold at his birth: he shared a given middle name, Theophilus, with no less a personage than Mozart. (Mozart Latinized the name to the more-familiar “Amadeus” as a young man.) He already had the makings of a piano virtuoso when he entered Oberlin Conservatory at the age of 14, and he later studied piano with the legendary Rudolf Serkin at Curtis and Robert Casadesus in Paris.
In Paris he came under the tutelage of the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who in her long career taught American composers from Aaron Copland (best known for Appalachian Spring) to Quincy Jones (perhaps best-known, and best-paid, for his work producing all of Michael Jackson’s big hits). Like many of Boulanger’s students Walker learned the art of “keeping the instruments out of one another’s way,” and counterpoint – the layered dialogue of melodies and countermelodies – drove his long career, which culminated in his being the first Black composer awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1996.
Counterpoint plays a powerful expressive role in Walker’s first masterwork, the Lyric for Strings. Walker was a 24-year-old graduate student at the Curtis Institute in 1946, when his grandmother and matriarch died just after he’d begun composing the second movement of his First String Quartet. The work immediately became a lament and a memorial, as Walker poured his memories and emotions directly onto the staff paper. By the time the whole quartet was complete, his professors had programmed the Adagio movement onto a string orchestra radio broadcast. Its power was immediately recognized with a standing ovation, and, as the Lyric for Strings, it has remained one of the best-loved American string pieces.
While the Lyric’s origin story and emotional power evoke that of Samuel Barber’s Adagio – written at Curtis ten years previously – its musical DNA is wholly its own and its effect is both more hopeful and more subtle. Walker’s affinity for Black spirituals and American folk music is readily apparent in its mournful opening melody and minor harmonies, but that melody is immediately engaged by countermelodies that introduce murmurs of hope. Hope and pain thread intimately together as major harmonies struggle to push through; after a shattering climax, hope and consolation remain, and the throbbing heartbeat of the piece’s counterpoint finally yields to an ineffable peace.
See a performance
Hear The Program
Chris Vaneman is the Dean of the School of the Arts and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse University. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.