George Walker Biography Essay

George Theophilus Walker was an amazing and talented composer. He composed many piano sonatas, operas, ballets, and many different types of music. Walker was an amazing composer and very good at what he did. Walker was the first black American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1996. Walker was an amazing composer, a great and loving family man, a successful writer, and an inspiration to all who compose music or have composed any piece of music in the past with Walker. Through his life he showed people that anything is possible if you believe in yourself, push on through the struggles, and persevere. George Walker was born in Washington D.C. On June 27, 1922. George was born into the West Indian-American parentage. His father,

George Walker was a successful man. He conducted, wrote, and played a part in many different pieces of music in his day and age. In November of 1945, Walker played in the third piano concerto by Rachmaninoff along with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy, the music director and conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Walker then went on to conduct his String Quartet No. 1and Lyric for Strings in 1946. In the year of 1950, Walker became the first black instrumentalist to be signed on by the National Concert Artists, a major management and corporation of music. In 1954, Walker left the United States and got to tour seven different European countries and he also got to play his music in each of them, making his music and composition more widely known, expressed, and loved. When he returned to the United States that same year, he taught at the Dillard University in New Orleans for one year. In 1955, after he finished teaching, he went and began earning the Doctor of Musical Arts Degree Program at the most famously known Eastman School of Music. George Walker has gotten many degrees over several years, taken many lessons over many different instruments and compositions, studied many things with other prominent musicians, and taken many tours around the world to play music, some of which were in Paris, France, Stockholm, Sweden, Copenhagen, Sweden, The Hague, Netherlands, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Frankfurt, Germany, Lausanne, Switzerland, Berne, Switzerland, Milan, Italy, and London in the United Kingdom. Walker was a very outstanding and fruitful