Julia Amanda Perry (1924-1979) was a composer of neoclassical music. Her father, Dr. Abe Perry, was a doctor and amateur pianist, who once accompanied the tenor Roland Hayes on tour. Her mother, America Perry, encouraged her children’s musical endeavors; both Julia and her sisters studied violin from a young age, and Julia switched to the piano.
After graduating from Akron High School, Perry attended Westminster Choir College in Princeton. She graduated with a bachelors and masters in music in 1948. Her master’s thesis, Chicago, inspired by the poetry of Carl Sandberg, was a secular cantata for baritone, narrator, mixed voices, and orchestra. She continued her musical training at the Julliard School of Music and spent summers at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood, MA. Her first major composition, the Stabat Mater, appeared in 1951.
In 1952 and 1954 Perry received two Guggenheim fellowships to study in Florence, Italy under the tutelage of Lugia Dallapiccola and in Paris, France with Nadia Boulanger. While in France she was awarded the Boulanger Grand Prix for her Viola Sonata. That year her opera, The Cask of Amontillado, was first staged at Columbia University. During that period, she spent her first of eight residencies at MacDowell and also wrote Homage to Vivaldi for performance by symphony orchestras.
She remained in Europe to study until 1959 when she returned to the United States to become part of the music faculty at Florida A&M and later took a teaching position at Atlanta University. She returned to Akron in 1960 and from an apartment above her father’s medical office she wrote Homunuclus C.F. (1960) for piano, harp, and a diverse group of percussion instruments. Her decision to use snare, timpani, and wood blocks, in addition to her frequent and creative changes in rhythm, illustrated her unusual sense of experimentation in her compositions Throughout the 1960s she organized and conducted concerts around the world for the U.S. Information Service (USIS).
By the late 1960s her works had received wide acclaim and were performed by the New York Philharmonic and other major orchestras. The classical record label, Composers Recordings, released several of her compositions in 1969; she also won awards and accolades from the National Association of Negro Musicians, the Boulanger Grand Prix, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, among others.
In 1971, however, Perry suffered the first of two strokes which left her hospitalized for several years. She taught herself to write with her left hand so she could continue to compose. She completed 12 symphonies, two concertos, and three operas, in addition to numerous smaller pieces, and died in Akron at the age of 55.
Source: blackpast.org
Photo: Bernice B. Perry, Milford Historical Society
