George Walker’s Piano Music

Abstract

Throughout his compositional career, George Walker dedicated himself to reimagining the traditional forms of tonal music, such as sonata and variations, in dissonant styles. This was a feat that Arnold Schoenberg (famously) declared to be impossible, at least for free atonal music; but Walker achieved it in the free atonal style as well as in his serial music. This article attempts to show how he did so, by presenting close readings of three piano pieces from Walker’s tonal, serial, and atonal periods: the first movement of the First Piano Sonata, Spatials, and the first movement of the Fourth Piano Sonata. Specifically, it considers the ways in which he uses pitch and pitch-class patterns (particularly referential collection progression and motivic variation), rhythm, dynamics, register, and tempo to simulate the various aspects of sonata and variation forms. For sonata form, this involves delimiting phrases and themes and creating senses of transition, retransition, and development; for variation form, it involves imitating the ways in which themes are preserved and varied by means of developmental processes. The results of this study will show that Walker’s music has much to teach us about how to recreate traditional forms in a dissonant harmonic language.