At New York City’s Town Hall on today’s date in 1968, the New England Festival Quartet premiered a new chamber work by the American composer George Walker.

Walker’s String Quartet No. 2 was sandwiched on the program between the String Quartet, Op 95, by Beethoven, and Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet, Op. 44, with George Walker performing the piano part in the Schumann – not surprisingly, since in addition to studying composition at the Curtis Institute, Walker had studied piano there as well, with Rudolf Serkin, no less. 

“What was gratifying,” wrote The New York Times music critic the following day, “was the fact that the Walker Quartet held up very well between two such strong works.”

28 years later, in 1996, Walker would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music – the first African-American composer to do so. But then, that was only one of George Walker’s many remarkable “firsts.” He was also the first black graduate of the Curtis Institute in 1945, the first black musician to play New York’s Town Hall that same year, the first black recipient of a doctorate from the Eastman School in 1955, and the first black tenured faculty member at Smith College in 1961.

George Walker (1922 – 2018): String Quartet No. 2 (Son Sonora String Quartet) Naxos 8559659