MONTCLAIR, N.J.

George Theophilus Walker was long ranked among the top American composers of modern classical music.

But he remains little known to the public, and major orchestras rarely play the nearly 100 works the pianist and music educator wrote over more than 70 years.

Dr. Walker was 74 before he started receiving a small portion of the national recognition that many believed he would have received far earlier if he had been Caucasian. That recognition came in 1996, when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for “Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra,” a composition meditating on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln set to the words of poet Walt Whitman.

The first African-American to win the award, the trailblazing Dr. Walker is being remembered following his death Thursday, Aug. 23, 2018, from complications from a fall, his family said. He was 96 and still working on new compositions, his family said.

A native of Washington, Dr Walker created music that is rooted in classical traditions, but also draws on “black musical idioms, such as spirituals, blues patterns and jazz tropes,” said Jeffrey Munford, an award-winning African-American composer and music educator who uses Dr. Walker’s music in his classes at an Ohio community college.

Dr. Walker’s works range from intricately orchestrated symphonic works and concertos to intimate songs and solo piano pieces, Mr. Munford said, “His music is always characterized by a great sense of dignity, which is how he always comported himself,” Mr. Munford said. “His style evolved over the years. His earlier works, some written while still a student, embody an impressive clarity and elegance.”

Mark Clague, who wrote the entry on Dr. Walker for the International Dictionary of Black Composers, stated that Dr. Walker “constructs his music so that the unknowing listener should not be able to distinguish it from that of his ‘canonized’ white contemporaries,” such as Igor Stravinsky.

Dr. Walker had many “firsts” before winning the Pulitzer.

In 1945, he was the first African-American pianist to play a recital at New York’s Town Hall, the first black instrumentalist to play solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the first black graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

In 1946, he wrote his first string quartet. He revised the second movement into a new piece in 1990 called “Lyric for Strings,” which is his most performed work.

Born June 27, 1922, he was taking piano lessons at age 5 and gave his first recital at 14 at Howard University.

By 15, the musical wunderkind had finished high school and enrolled in Oberlin College in Ohio on a scholarship. After graduating in three years, he went to the Curtis Institute, where he studied piano with Rudolf Serkin and composition with Samuel Barber. Dr. Walker earned his Ph.D. in music from the Eastman School of Music in 1956.

In the 1950s, he performed in Europe, and in 1957, he went to Paris to study for two years with the famous musical pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, whose students ranged from Aaron Copland to Quincy Jones.

Mr. Mumford said Ms. Boulanger “was so impressed with (Dr. Walker’s) musicianship that she allowed him to bring anything he wanted to lessons.”

Dr. Walker tried to avoid being labeled as an African-American composer. He said in a 1987 interview that the label helped get his works played at symposiums on “black music,” but kept him from having a “wider dispersion of my music and more performances.”

Dr. Walker’s reputation as a composer of works for orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Boston Symphony grew slowly.

Mr. Mumford said Dr. Walker struggled to get his music played, and it still is not regularly performed.

“We have a great deal of work to do regarding orchestra programming of composers of color,” Mr. Mumford said. “Dr. Walker deserved many more performances than he has received thus far. Sad to say that even the work that earned him the Pulitzer has not graced the concert hall nearly enough.”

In addition to being a composer and musician, Dr. Walker was also an educator. He spent 23 years as a professor and chairman of Rutgers University’s music department before retiring in 1992 at age 70.

Before joining the Rutgers faculty in 1969, he taught briefly at Dillard University and then spent seven years at Smith College, where he was the first African-American professor to be awarded tenure.

During the course of his career, he also held faculty appointments at the Dalcroze School of Music and The New School, both in New York. He took leaves from Rutgers to teach music at the University of Colorado, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Delaware, where he was awarded a chair.

In 1999, at age 77, Dr. Walker was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was inducted in 2000 into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in Cincinnati.

During his career, Dr. Walker also received Guggenheim, Fulbright and Whitney fellowships and honorary doctorates from six institutions, including Oberlin and Spelman College.

Dr. Walker is survived by two sons, Ian Walker, a playwright, and Gregory T.S. Walker, a violinist and former concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra in Colorado.