Walter Winslow (1947 - 1998), an American composer, born in Salem, Oregon, whose life was cut short by cancer at age 50. As the works on this disc display, his eloquent music was influenced not just by the history of music gone before, but also by legends and relics of European antiquities and by the beauty and solitude of nature.
Born and raised in Salem, Oregon, Walter Winslow was drawn to music as a young child, and began composing at the age of eight. At nineteen, when he was attending Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music he wrote the first of two string quartets. Graduating summa cum laude with degrees in musical composition and Russian in 1970, he went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley with Edward Dugger, Andrew Imbrie, and Olly Wilson, and earned a Ph.D. in music in 1975.
Winslow pursued a teaching career in musical composition during the decades that followed, with positions at Berkeley, Oberlin, Reed College and Columbia University and finally at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey where he was a teacher of piano from 1990 to 1997. Composer Mario Pelusi, his colleague at Lawrenceville, once observed: "Taking a music lesson with Walter was often like looking into the soul of music itself."
An accomplished pianist, Winslow played in recitals throughout his life. Deeply committed to twentieth-century music, he won his first piano competition in 1965 with Shostakovitch's Second Piano Concerto. He had broad musical tastes, and the programs of his recitals read like a short history of Western music, with works by Scarlatti, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Chopin, and Schubert, as well as his own works and pieces by Schoenberg, Boulez and Mario Davidovsky.
Diagnosed with cancer in December 1994, Winslow was given about a year and a half to live. He defied that initial bleak diagnosis by continuing to write music, to perform and to teach for another three years. He performed Bach's Goldberg Variations, one of the most demanding pieces in the piano repertoire, in two recitals in the Fall of 1997, just months before he died — an extraordinary testimony to his strength, character and passion!