Robert Douglas Walters

1943 - 1998

Robert (Bob) Walters, multi-talented string performer, composer and conductor, taught music at all levels in a teaching career that spanned over thirty years. He taught at two Seventh-day Adventist colleges in the U.S., composed a significant body of music, conducted several orchestras, and was passionate about providing musical opportunities and experiences for students of all ages.
 
Robert was born in Clinton, Massachusetts, on February 25, 1943, one of four children and the oldest of three sons of Alfred and Margaret Louise Schulz Walters. From his earliest years he was surrounded by music, the extended family on his father\\'s side being active as teachers and performers and his father, a violinist, being a teacher at nearby Atlantic Union College.
 
When he was four, the family moved to Riverside, California, where his father became string teacher and director of the orchestra at La Sierra College, now University. Robert began playing the violin at age six and gained proficiency on it as well as the viola, cello, and string bass.
 
He began composing under the tutelage of Perry Beach while he was a student at La Sierra, an activity he would pursue for the rest of his career. After graduating from LSC in 1965 with a B.A. in violin and composition, he obtained an M.A. in music at California State University in Los Angeles and a D.M.A. in musical composition from the University of Missouri.
 
Walters married Myrna Mae Kenney on June 10, 1963, and they would have a son, Robert, Jr., on December 5, 1965. He began teaching in the Los Angeles, California, area as director of strings and orchestras for the Southeast Conference of Seventh-day Adventists and started a career in higher education in 1966, serving first as orchestra conductor and associate professor of music at Union College and then at Columbia Union College, now Washington Adventist University. He returned to Lincoln, Nebraska, following his work at CUC to freelance as a composer and manage the Nebraska Chamber Orchestra.
 
Under the aegis of the Nebraska Arts Council, Walters received National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1975 and 1976 to be composer in residence in Seward, Nebraska. When he started his first year there, he realized that if this small rural community liked his music, the grant could be more than just a one-year experience. It was a turning point for him as a composer.
 
He later observed, "For the first time in my life, instead of writing for my file cabinet and intellectual composer friends, I began writing for real people who had to listen to the music." While teaching students and senior citizens how to compose, he also discovered the rewards of teaching adults who were beginners, a process he especially enjoyed for the rest of his life. In 1977 Walters became associate professor of Music at Hastings College, Hastings, Nebraska, and conductor of the Hastings Civic Symphony.
 
It was my good fortune to teach with Bob, as his friends and colleagues knew him, at Union College. He was in the studio next to mine when I began teaching there in 1968.  He was an inspired, creative musician with an impish sense of humor who delighted in defying the more conservative constraints that existed in both academia and society at that time.  The resulting assaults on convention led to some humorous situations best left unwritten.
 
In retrospect, even though Bob was six months younger than I was, his influence helped me to become more open, daring, and aware of my own creative possibilities - as he did with his many students over the years. When he left UC, our families kept in touch and he would return to follow me as chair of the Division of Fine Arts in 1979.
 
In addition to assuming leadership of the fine arts division Bob established and directed the Lincoln Civic Orchestra. In that same year, cellist David Low commissioned a two-movement cello concerto from Walters. The work was performed by the Nebraska Chamber Orchestra and following some revision, subsequently broadcast on mid-west PBS stations and later performed by the Redlands Symphony. At the time of the Redlands performance, Walters talked about its origin and its programmatic nature to Tom Jacobs, Arts Writer for the San Bernardino Sun, who then wrote:
 
"The seed of the work" was a middle-of-the-night phone call from his brother, who reported that his son, Aaron, had just been born. The next morning, Walters began working on "a cradle song" as a gift for his brother, who was an experienced cellist as well as new father.
 
"It sat on my desk for several months," he recalled, until he got a call from another cellist, David Low, who asked about a commission. \\'Suddenly I knew what I was going to do with that long, unaccompanied melody for cello," Walters said.  It would become the opening of his cello concerto.
 
Walters called the opening melody "Aaron\\'s Song," which brought to mind the Biblical character with the same name. Thus, that first movement became a musical study of the Biblical Aaron and the second movement became a companion character sketch of Moses ["Moses at the Burning Bush"].
 
"Aaron, he noted, was a glib speaker, a poet, a high priest, and "probably a politician." To depict him in music, he used "long flowing melodic lines" and "a kind of facile harmonic language."
 
In contrast, Moses was a "kind of a thorny figure" who "doesn\\'t get along with people nearly as well as Aaron."  He also stuttered, a feature Walters worked into his music. "The musical materials are short, angular rhythmic lines which are repeated . . . the way a person who stutters might speak," he said, adding that the movement is full of pungent dissonances.
 
Walters\\' Symphony No. 1, written between 1971 and 1974, was premiered by the South Coast Symphony at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, in 1985. It is a personal work, reflecting his view that "all symphonies are a diary of a spiritual journey. The composer always leaves tracks of his life on a score." He later elaborated with a description of each movement:
 
The first movement, "In Times Like These," reflects the turmoil and the struggle of the 1960s. The second, "In Quiet Times," is essentially a love song which deals with feelings of yearning and repose. The third, "Celebration," is like wandering through a party and hearing lots of conversation; the whole thing is a series of dances.
 
At the time of the premiere he was still serving as fine arts division chair at Union College, on leave as an exchange professor in Beijing, China. While in China, he became the first Westerner to conduct his own compositions, the symphony and another work as an encore, with Beijing’s prestigious Central Philharmonic Orchestra.
 
Walters returned to direct the Redlands University Community Music School and establish and direct an orchestra, Symphonia California. He subsequently moved to Forest Falls near Redlands, California, where he conducted the Mountain Chamber Orchestra and originated the RIM Festival Chorus in Lake Arrowhead.
 
By the time of another move to Ridgecrest in 1993, complications from a diabetic condition had caused a rapid decline in his health. Even so, Walters continued writing and teaching. His wife, Myrna, recalls: "I think he had his best teaching experiences during his last five years. He would sit in a big leather stuffed chair in the living room, and all his students would come to him." During part of this time he was completely blind.
 
Bill Harwood, pastor of the Ridgecrest Seventh –day Adventist church, thought of him as "a very compassionate man, a deep-thinking sort of man." One of his last projects, a difficult one given his failing health, was the raising of money in 1997 to purchase instruments for all the students in the first six grades of the High Desert SDA School.
 
He conducted the school orchestra and volunteered to teach students in the school to play the violin. Judy Harwood, a teacher at the school, was amazed at his patience. She describes the reaction following one number at the Christmas concert that fall: "I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house after those little six-year-olds got up and performed on their tiny violins."
 
Bob was living in Ridgecrest, California, when he died on May 7, 1998, at age 55. He was survived by his wife, Myrna; son, Robert Walters, Jr.; mother, Margaret, of Redlands; and two brothers, David and John. He is buried in Brownville, Nebraska.
 
A memorial service was held at the time of his death at the Ridgecrest SDA church, Pastor Harwood, officiating. In the following year, a memorial concert honoring Walters was presented on May 28 in Lincoln, Nebraska, at the Plymouth Congregational Church to benefit the Lincoln Civic Orchestra.  It featured the orchestra, musicians who were important in Bob’s life, and his son, Robert, Jr., playing several of his father\\'s compositions.
 
Robert, Jr. was principal English horn with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra at that time. He became principal English horn in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 2000 and in 2004 became a member of the oboe section and principal English horn in the Cleveland Orchestra, a position he continues to hold.
But Days are
Oh Such Fragile Things
like dew-filled roses
wings of moths
and the silken threads
of Spiders
Spinning . . .
 
Robert Douglas Walters, Sr.
ds/2019
 
Sources: Robert Douglas Walters, Massachusetts, Birth Index, 1860-1970; Find a Grave Index, 1600s-Current; both at Ancestry.com; Alfred Walters obituary, Review and Herald, March 1, 1973, 30; See biography for Alfred Walters; Clint Erney, "OCC to host world Symphony debut," Orange County Register, March 7, 1985, C9; California, Marriage Index, 1960-1985, Ancestry.com; California Birth Index, 1905-1995, Ancestry.com; Photo caption, Columbia Union Visitor, September 30, 1971, 24; Tom Jacobs, "They’re staging a concert of note, Redland Symphony sets West Coast premiere," San Bernardino Sun, March 15, 1985, C 1, 9; Xiong Xlaoge, "U.S. composer’s first with the symphony," China Daily, June 14, 1985, 5; Robert Walters obituary, unknown writer and source; In Memorium, Dr. Robert Walters, Concert May 28, 1999, printed program; Additional information about Robert Douglas Walters and his son, Robert Douglas Walters, Jr., can be found at www.iamaonline.com.

 A Tribute

Dan Shultz

News of the unexpected death of Robert Walters resulted in a particularly poignant and thought-provoking period of reflection for me. Bob, as his friends and colleagues knew him, was in the studio next to mine when I began teaching at Union College in 1968. A spirited, creative musician with an impish sense of humor, he delighted in defying the more conservative and formal constraints that existed in both academia and society at that time. And the resulting assaults on convention led to some humorous situations best left unwritten.

Bob reveled in the high that happens when creative juices flow. The results were delightful forays in the imaginative use of words and notes, refreshing enjoyments for those of us that read or heard the results. He dared to present ideas that on first airing seemed unnerving, a bit unrealistic, even grandiose, but when realized, often proved to be first-class happenings.

He was always making deals, bartering some service he might provide for one you could do. He approached me one summer about swapping music lessons for our children. He would teach my daughter Karan violin, if I would teach Robert, his only child, the oboe. Though young, Robert, Jr., made excellent progress, spurred on by an incentive program that rewarded practice with everything from a bicycle to a motorcycle. While some might cringe at this approach to getting results, that was Bob at his creative best... and it worked, as you can read in the bio for Robert, Jr.

In retrospect, even though Bob was six years younger than I was, his influence helped me become more open, daring, and aware of my own creative possibilities - as he did with his many students over the years. When he left Union College, he and his wife, Myrna, and Robert, Jr., kept in touch with my family. He would return to follow me there as music department chair and then, following his quest for new challenges, he left to pursue a variety of other musical activities until his untimely death.

When I approached Robert, Jr.,  about doing a tribute for his father, he eagerly accepted, having enjoyed a close and affectionate relationship with him. At the same time, though a talented writer as well as professional musician, he expressed concern about his ability to convey fully the admiration and love he felt for the man who was both his father and his mentor.

 

Seven Years of Plenty

Robert Walters, Jr.

In the spring of 1975, while I was nine years old, my father had arranged for my first oboe lessons to be held in the living room of our home in Lincoln, Nebraska. Dan Shultz, who was then teaching at Union College, was probably not in the habit of making musical house calls to beginning oboists; this scenario only makes sense when you realize that during my lesson, my father was upstairs in his studio teaching Dan\\'s daughter Karan the violin!

From the first note on page one of Rubank\\'s Elementary Oboe Method, I was entering the world of music, which was my father\\'s world. That first note became the first step on the sung path that would become my life\\'s vocation, a calling if you will. From that first note, my father stood just a few steps ahead of me, offering his gentle hand, inviting me to join him on the musical journey of his own life as he helped to guide mine and lay for me a foundation of musical experience that would become the basis for everything I\\'ve done since.

During the months of my first oboe lessons, my father was Composer-in-Residence for the county of Seward, Nebraska, through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Nebraska Arts Council. He wrote music for civic occasions, such as the annual Fourth of July parade, and taught every child in the elementary school system how to play a string instrument and, in fact, how to write music. Using such techniques as graphs and decks of cards, he introduced children to the freedom and creativity of writing their own music as a means of discovering what music was. The cards comprised carefully chosen pitches and rhythms to enable 12-tone and pentatonic writing. In some cases the students would combine the materials with words to make songs, and each project was carefully constructed in complexity to meet various age levels. I still remember attending a performance of J.R.R. Tolkein\\'s The Hobbit which the sixth grade class had turned into an opera using their own music!

Although my father spent most of his teaching career at the college level, I\\'ve always felt fortunate that during my formative years on the oboe, he was so deeply involved with teaching music to children. I remember sitting at the piano in his music studio one day after school while he was at the drafting table copying music. "What\\'s that?" he asked. "What\\'s what?" I said. "What you\\'re playing... what\\'s that music you\\'re playing?" I was repeating over and over some little pattern I had made up and something about this would-be melody struck his ear.

He stopped what he was doing and came and sat next to me at the piano. He asked me to play it again. He smiled and began writing it down on staff paper. He then spent the next hour or so showing me all the things we could do with my piece of melody to turn it into music. He turned it into a self-chasing fugue, "Here" he said, "let\\'s play it upside down!" He played it half as slow, twice as fast; he played it in different styles, showed me how the same melody could make you feel different depending on what kind of chords went with it or what register you played it in.

He took it even farther than that. He asked my permission to use our jointly discovered music in one of his own compositions. I can\\'t describe what it felt like two months later when I heard that music being played by the Nebraska Chamber Orchestra at the premiere of his newly commissioned French horn concerto and then discovered that had thanked me for my contributio in the program notes.

In 1976 my father was composer-in-residence at the Brownville Summer Music Festival, where he had received a commission to write A Gift from the River, a work of musical theater that celebrates Nebraska history and was premiered as part of a state-wide Bicentennial celebration. For six weeks that summer, he and I shared a small red house furnished with only two beds, a table, two chairs and a music stand.

I had been playing oboe for just over a year and he wanted me to come away from that summer knowing all my scales and key signatures. My allowance at that time was based on how much I practiced, so he made up this elaborate graph of how long it might take to learn my scales and how much I might earn toward the purchase of a new bike in the fall! Needless to say, I learned my scales.

The atmosphere of a good summer music camp, being both serious and fun, was something I responded well to, so for the next several summers my father looked for similar programs for me to attend. In time I began to practice out of my own desire to play well and eventually weaned myself off of the initial "practice = allowance" incentive program. In truth, my father knew this would happen for me over time, and just wanted to spare me the psychological baggage of being "forced" to practice by a well-meaning parent.

I was entering the ninth grade in 1979 when my Father became chairman of the music department at Union College. That year he also founded the Lincoln Civic Orchestra, which this season celebrates its twentieth anniversary and which spent the first five years of its existence in residence at Union College. It was the first symphony orchestra in which I had ever played principal oboe, and my father was the first conductor that I learned to play for. Every Thursday night for the next three years, I would plod my teenage-self through the great symphonic literature under his direction. To this day I associate being in an orchestra with being his son.

My first experiences playing chamber music were also shaped by my dad. Dr. Robert Murray, who was on the piano faculty at that time and played a great deal of harpsichord, also had a son named Robert, who was just one year ahead of me at College View Academy and happened to play the cello. My father always knew an opportunity when he saw one, and before we knew it a chamber group was born with the improbable yet perfect name of Roberts IV: two sets of fathers and sons, all playing instruments, all named Robert. We rehearsed on Sunday mornings and read our way through endless stacks of trio sonatas by Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi, Quantz, Sammartini, and Bach (both JS and CPE,"another famous father and son team!" my dad would chime in whenever he could).

It was thrilling to be playing all this music with my own father and to feel him coaxing me along as a performer. Somehow he managed to make his acne-stricken, adolescent son feel like a valued and respected colleague. It was also incredible fun. My father\\'s "impish" wit was unbridled during those Sunday morning rehearsals and kept them from getting too serious. The Murrays were no strangers to laughter themselves and I remember many times the music breaking down altogether because someone had said something ridiculous and the four of us would fall deliciously into this tandem father and son laughing fit, which, when I think about it now, makes me deliriously happy and grateful.

Our "Debut" occurred on the air during a fund raising drive for KUCV, which was at that time the college-owned classical music station for southeast Nebraska. Soon after that we were on the road. We packed up the harpsichord in the back of a Union College van and for the next three years played countless concerts in churches, auditoriums, academies and camp meetings throughout a seven-state region in cities like Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. Many who wouldn\\'t traditionally find themselves in the audience for such "highbrow" music were delighted simply to see two teenage boys in tuxedos on stage with their fathers.

Dr. Murray\\'s son and I used to laugh at the fact that while most of our peers were at home forming garage bands and alienating their parents, here we were "on tour" with our dads playing all this "sissy" music. It was all great fun and besides being a pleasure for the four of us, it had the obvious benefit of letting the music department at Union College be "heard" throughout the land.

It makes my head spin to realize how quickly this all would pass, that soon the oboe which had made me so deeply a part of my father\\'s world would send me out into a world of its own. By 1982, at the age of 16 - just seven years after those first lessons in the living room with Dan Shultz - I would leave my home in Nebraska to follow my own musical path. I had been accepted as a student of Richard Woodhams, Principal Oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and would subsequently study with him at the Curtis Institute of Music. I\\'m sure it was not an easy decision for my parents to let their only child leave home at such a young age. I recently found a letter my father sent to me the first week of my first semester back East: "It is a difficult thing to lose one\\'s best friend and son at the same time," he wrote.

It was that mixture of roles that I cherished in our relationship. The fact that my early musical experiences are so closely aligned with the time I spent growing up with him is of great consolation to me now. As a young child he was like Brahms to me and even as a somewhat rebellious teenager, I preferred his company to just about anyone else\\'s.

After leaving home when I did, I would have just a few more opportunities to make music with him. One summer he took the Union College chamber orchestra to England for a joint festival with the music department at Newbold College. With my father conducting, I played the Marcello Oboe Concerto on a tour of the great cathedrals of England, Scotland, and France.

The other occasion was with the China Film Philharmonic for a concert that was broadcast live on Radio Beijing. The Chinese press loved the fact that we were performing as father and son. When asked to respond to the upcoming concert with his son that would be broadcast throughout all of China, he told one reporter, "Considering that one quarter of the world\\'s population has an opportunity to hear this concert - it\\'s a bigger audience than we typically get."

I miss his sense of humor. I miss everything about him. It is hard to lose one\\'s father and best friend at the same time. The week that he died was the end of my first season with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. We were playing a concert version of Wagner\\'s Tristan und Isolde which has the famous off-stage English horn solo at the beginning of the third act.

Complications from diabetes had kept him in the hospital for weeks before this performance. Up until the day before the concert he was fighting with the doctors to let him go hear his son play the opera. I worried about him traveling and convinced him to stay in the hospital in part by the fact that I would be coming out to see him at the end of the week and would bring him a tape of the performance. A few days after that concert, I sent him a postcard which he did not live long enough to receive. It was very brief, but as I wrote it I felt as if I was thanking him for everything he had ever been to me.

Dear Dad,

If this card gets home before I do, it\\'s to let you know I\\'m on my way and to say that my performance here in this weekend\\'s Tristan und Isolde would never have occurred without the early musical nurturing that your Nebraska fathering provided. Thank you for making this all possible; I never play a note without feeling where it came from.

But Days are

Oh Such Fragile Things

like dew-filled roses

wings of moths

and the silken threads

of Spiders

Spinning . . .

Robert Walters, Sr.

 Additional information about Robert Walters, Jr., and Alfred Walters can be found at www.iamaonline.com