Teaching Twentieth-Century Stylistic Pluralism Through the Music of George Walker

The chapter extends recent efforts to diversify the repertoire and techniques in courses devoted to twentieth-century music by offering one to three weeks’ worth of material that allows students to explore tonal music in the twentieth-century classroom, as well as music that does not fit neatly into tonal and atonal categories. Organized as a series of guided analyses for the theory instructor, the chapter seeks to familiarize both teacher and student with a major American composer, George Walker, whose music is both understudied and underrecorded. In so doing, it offers a fuller picture of twentieth-century American music.