Happy Birthday, Julia Perry!

The following are remarks I prepared for a Julia Perry 100th Birthday concert I organized at Ann Arbor’s Kerrytown Concert on March 25, 2024 with my University of Michigan colleague, Dr. Louise Toppin.

Follow this link to watch an archived stream of the performance, which features students enrolled in Dr. Toppin’s ‘African American Art Song’ course.

Concert Introduction:

Thank you to Dr. Toppin and her wonderful students for their hard work preparing what you are about to hear. And, thank you to the Kerrytown Concert House for hosting this special community-facing event, which was made possible through the support of the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance's Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.

Happy Birthday, Julia Perry! 

We are here to celebrate 100 years of Julia Perry, an astoundingly gifted composer whose career peaked in the 1950s and early 1960s before it fell into tragic decline due to serious illness, financial insecurity, and increasingly limited opportunities. Today's concert, and all the other events marking this anniversary, are possible because scholars, like Dr. Toppin and others before her, have spent decades recovering what we now know of Perry's biography and compositional catalog. 

Yes, Julia Perry was born one hundred years ago today — on March 25, 1924 — in Lexington, Kentucky. Her father, Abe, was a physician, and he moved the family to Akron, OH when Julia was eight years old. Abe and Julia's mother, America Perry, gave all their daughters focused musical training from an early age. It is so wonderful that today's recital highlights vocal music, because singing and writing for the voice represent enormous parts of Julia Perry's upbringing and career as a composer. 

Beginning in the early 1940s, Ohio newspapers record Julia and her sisters' accomplishments in performance, particularly as singers. A 1945 article in the Cleveland Call and Post recounts a notable story from Julia's undergraduate studies at Westminster Choir College, in Princeton, New Jersey. While visiting New York City's Cafe Society Night Club that spring, Julia gave an impromptu vocal performance that impressed the renowned African-American pianist Dorothy Donegan so much that she offered Julia a $250/week contract to sing there the rest of the summer. Julia demurred.

Over the next few years, she began focusing her attention on composing. An August 1949 profile of Perry in The Christian Science Monitor centered around her time at the Tanglewood Music Center underscores her achievements and goals as a composer, even though she was enrolled in choral singing. The piece notes that Perry's spiritual arrangement, Lord What Shall I Do?, had just been published in Boston and the score was available for purchase at the Tanglewood Center music store.

In the summer of 1951, Julia Perry performed as soloist for the world premiere of her Stabat Mater; also at Tanglewood, where she now studied composition with the Italian modernist, Luigi Dallpiccola. This may be the last time Perry sang in a concert setting, but its impact resounded for years. Stabat Mater was Perry's career break out, and it initiated more than a decade of success that included multiple Guggenheim Fellowships, performance and conducting tours in Europe, an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, eight residencies at MacDowell, and a 1965 orchestral performance by the New York Philharmonic.

These achievements have led many to believe that instrumental music was the cornerstone of Julia Perry's work as a composer. And, accordingly, much of the recent re-engagement with her output has overlooked her vocal music except for Stabat Mater. But, during her career, even at its international apex, songs and the loyal support of singers, many of whom were also Black women, served as Julia's musical foundation. As you are about to hear, her vocal compositions encompass an incredible expressive and aesthetic range. In my opinion, Perry's songs truly represent her musical voice. 

Thank you for joining us to wish Julia Perry a happy 100th birthday. Enjoy today's performance, and now I will welcome my colleague: Dr. Louise Toppin.

Context for By The Sea, Serenity, Parody, and Six Contrasts:

Three of the next four works are not well-known — at least, not yet — but still provide an astonishing portrait of Julia Perry's range as a composer. By The Sea was a legitimate hit for Perry, and most likely dates from the late 1940s. The celebrated Black soprano Ellabelle Davis, who took interest in Perry's music during the composer's stint at Tanglewood, programmed By The Sea as early as 1949. In February 1953, soprano Adele Addison sang Perry's By The Sea on national radio, accompanied by another important Black woman composer of the mid-twentieth century: Margaret Bonds. Tender and languid, By The Sea shows Julia Perry's skill for vocal melody and comfort in an impressionistic idiom that recalls the aesthetics of an earlier generation of Black American composers.

Serenity, for solo oboe or clarinet, was completed in 1972. This work's lyricism carries the spirit of By The Sea, but Serenity focuses more on the space between notes than traditional linear movement. Of all the works on this concert, Serenity gives us a chance to hear a lesser-understood aspect of Perry's late-career style, which presciently overlaps with aspects of American minimalism and post-minimalism.

Parody and Six Contrasts were both composed at MacDowell in 1954, but Contrasts received a revision in 1957, completed while Perry lived in Siena, Italy. Although these pieces are not much older than By The Sea, they depart dramatically from its style; illustrating, in this way, Perry's attraction to dissonant sounds and experimentalism. Parody is gestural and abstract — the performance instructions describe the tempo as, "boldly rhythmical". The song's piano accompaniment features a brash, dissonant motive that recurs multiple times, echoing the techniques on display in Perry's much more well-known Stabat Mater from 1951.

Six Contrasts lives up to the variety suggested by its title. The third movement, "Ghosts for sale," is comical, and the fifth, "Lullaby for Rhoda," may remind you of By The Sea. But, much of the rest of the work experiments with texture and space, particularly in the piano accompaniment. We can see this quality of Six Contrasts as the bud that grows into the more directly minimalist character of Perry's later works, like Serenity.