Julia Perry (1924-1979) was a prolific composer whose music combined a career’s worth of study in European classical training with her own African American heritage.
Julia Perry (1924-1979) was a prolific composer whose music combined a career’s worth of study in European classical training with her own African American heritage.
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Today, we’re talking about a prolific American composer. Her music combined a career’s worth of study in European classical training with her own African-American heritage. The result was an eclectic and powerful repertoire of operas, symphonies, and choral works that continue to astound audiences today. Let’s talk about Julia Perry.
Julia was born Julia Amanda Perry in Lexington, Kentucky on March 25, 1924. Her father, Dr. Abe Perry, was a doctor and amateur pianist. Her mother, America Perry, encouraged all her children to learn music. Julia and her sisters grew up training on various instruments. Julia herself began on violin and piano.
Soon after Julia’s birth, the Perrys moved to Akron, Ohio, which Julia called home. She graduated high school there and traveled to Princeton, New Jersey. There, she studied piano, voice, and composition at Westminster Choir College. She graduated in 1948 with a bachelors and a masters in music. From there, she studied conducting at Juilliard and spent summers learning about composition in Tanglewood, Massachusetts at the Berkshire Music Center.
At this first stage in her career as a composer, Julia’s works focused on vocal arrangements and choral music. They were heavily influenced by spirituals, and many were arrangements of well-known songs like Free at Last or Song of Our Savior. Some pieces also incorporated aspects of the blues. She wrote her first major composition, called the Stabat Mater, in 1951. It showed signs of what was to come in her music: though it was strictly defined as a tonal piece, it incorporated dissonance and many modern compositional techniques.
That same year, Julia won her first Guggenheim fellowship to continue her composition studies with composer Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence. She received a second fellowship in 1954 to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. She was also sponsored by the U.S. Information Service to conduct a series of concerts across Europe.
While in Europe, Julia continued to experiment with and refine her style. Her music increasingly included dissonant harmonies, shifting rhythms, and layered textures. Her subject material was equally as unique. Her operatic ballet The Selfish Giant was based on Oscar Wilde’s short story of the same name; her vocal work The Symplegades was based on the panic surrounding the 17th century Salem witch trials; and her ground-breaking Homunculus, a piece for ten percussionists, was named after a test tube creature brought to life in Goethe’s Faust. Julia also described this last piece as “pantonal,” since it was neither major nor minor and used all available tones.
Julia returned to the US in 1959. She spent time teaching at Florida A&E College and Atlanta University before returning to Akron. There, she lived in an apartment above her father’s medical office and continued to compose.
She would later write that America had changed since she’d been gone. Julia was deeply invested in the civil rights movement taking place in the country, and her art shifted to reflect this long-held influence in more pronounced ways. Her “A Suite Symphony,” from 1976, drew on rock and roll and rhythm and blues, for example. And her tenth symphony, titled, “Soul Symphony,” was a direct response to ongoing unrest and protest.
Julia’s work also became widely known in the 60s. Her pieces were played by the New York Philharmonic and other major orchestras. She received countless awards and accolades, including a National Institutes of Arts and Letters Award in 1964.
In 1971, Julia suffered the first of a series of strokes. They left her paralyzed on her right side– but Julia taught herself to write with her left hand and continued to compose. She died on April 24, 1979, at 55 years old. Before her death, she wrote an incredible repertoire of experimental music melding her greatest influences into her own style: 12 symphonies, 2 concertos, 3 operas, and a number of smaller vocal and instrumental arrangements.