George Walker’s Piano Music: Traditional Forms in Tonal, Serial and Atonal Styles

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.  My article attempts to show how he did that, 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.   It considers the ways in which he uses pitch patterns (particularly referential collection progression and motivic variation), in addition to rhythm, dynamics, register, and tempo, to simulate the various aspects of sonata and variation forms.  This includes delimiting phrases and themes and creating the sense of transition, retransition, or development in sonata form through referential collection patterns, as well as imitating the ways in which themes are varied and kept the same within variation form by set-class consistency and developmental processes involving dyad motives.  I want to show that Walker’s music has much to teach us about how to recreate traditional forms in a dissonant harmonic language.