Willis Page

Willis Page (born September 18, 1918, Rochester, N.Y., died January 9, 2013.), was a musician and symphony orchestra conductor. He conducted three major US orchestras – in Nashville, Tennessee, Des Moines, Iowa, and Jacksonville, Florida. He was also the associate conductor in Buffalo, New York, where he conducted three quarters of all concerts and has been guest conductor for several orchestras including the Boston Pops Orchestra (seven times), Denver, St Louis, Rochester, Hartford, Muncie, Yomiuri, Toronto and Jerusalem. He was the first US conductor of a major Japanese symphony orchestra, the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. He was the first conductor to hire black musicians in a classical orchestra in the USA.

He attended the Eastman School of Music, where he graduated with distinction, having been awarded double Performance Degrees on the Double Bass and the Tuba. Willis was a protege of Pierre Monteux. In 1940, he was invited by Serge Koussevitsky to join the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO).

His musical career was interrupted in 1943 when he joined the US army; he worked as a German translator for the General of the 95th Infantry and was awarded the Bronze Star. Immediately after the war, his linguistic talents were turned to assisting the displaced people of Germany. In total, he had to deal with over 100,000 individuals.

In 1946, he was at the forefront of a campaign to raise aid in the US for the starving peoples of Eastern Europe. In three months his campaign raised over $25,000.

After the War, he returned to the BSO where he became Assistant Principal; he was also principal bass for Arthur Fiedler’s Boston Pops Orchestra. In 1952, he made his debut as a conductor, leading the Boston Pops in front of an audience of 20,000. In 1954, he conducted 65 members of the BSO in the first stereo recordings ever made (at the time referred to as binaural recordings) – eleven recordings in total, recorded for Cook Laboratories. At the start of 1955, he was appointed as Associate Conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (under Josef Krips), with whom he had already made eleven appearances as guest conductor. In 1957, he taught Ortiz Walton, the first African American to be a member of a major American orchestra: Walton was bass player with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

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