The Music of Julia Perry
“The state of Julia Perry’s musical legacy is particularly tragic because she was staggeringly accomplished.”
Julia Perry’s (1924-1979) music is expressive and individual. Perry’s compositions contain artifacts of different styles, traditions, and trends — including a variety of atonal techniques popular at the height of her career — but they are always framed by her distinctive artistic point of view. I first encountered Perry’s music in the spring of 2018, when I compiled a listening list of twentieth century classical music for my composition students at Madonna University in Livonia, MI. Because this group of students was majority-Black, I made sure this list to feature as diverse a population of composers as possible, particularly composers of African descent.
That document included Julia Perry’s Stabat Mater (1951), which remains one of the only pieces of Perry’s to be commercially recorded, though not since the 1960s. My concert presenting organization, ÆPEX Contemporary Performance, hopes our new video recordings of the Stabat Mater and Pastoral (1959), featuring mezzo-soprano Olivia Johnson and flutist Brice Smith as soloists, will help make these works, and Julia Perry’s other music, more accessible and appealing to contemporary performing arts institutions and audiences.
My research collaborations with the ÆPEX Anthology Advisory Board over the last two years has repeatedly shown the importance of quality recordings and well-engraved scores to overcoming the obstacles of access that serve to keep composers with historically excluded identities on the margins of classical music’s performance and academic fields. Recordings like ÆPEX’s will hopefully play a role in securing Julia Perry the appreciation she and her music deserve, but her reputation as a composer is also harmed by a paucity of printed scores.
The state of Julia Perry’s musical legacy is particularly tragic because she was staggeringly accomplished. Perry studied composition at Westminster Choir College, Juilliard, Tanglewood, and worked privately in Europe with Nadia Boulnager and Luigi Dallapiccolla. In the 1950s and 60s, she received two Guggenheim fellowships along with awards from ASCAP and the American Academy for the Arts and Letters. In 1965, the New York Philharmonic commissioned and premiered a new work of Perry’s, Study, which was performed twice on programs that also featured the high-profile soloists Van Cliburn and Itzhak Perlman. And, in 1954, Columbia University organized two performances of Julia Perry’s music, including a February 20 event that culminated with a panel discussion wherein she shared the stage with George Antheil, a living legend in American music composition at that time.
When asked about the origins of the Stabat Mater during this audience Q&A session, Julia Perry explains that her choice to score the work for a single vocal soloist came from her admiration for Marion Anderson, whom Perry dreamed would sing the piece. This speaks to Perry’s personal connection to the composition, which she dedicated to her mother. During the production of ÆPEX’s recording of Stabat Mater, mezzo-soprano Olivia Johnson insisted on performing Perry’s English translation of the original Latin text because it centers a female point of view as the work’s narrator, something that sets Perry’s Stabat Mater apart from the precedents by Rossini and Pergolesi, which she references. At one point in the aforementioned panel discussion, Julia Perry acknowledges that she prefers the English text because it is more accessible to an American audience. Thanks to Olivia’s voice in our collaboration, ÆPEX’s recording realizes Perry’s ideal vision for the work.
After revisiting Julia Perry’s accomplishments and experiencing the celebration she received that evening at Columbia University, the fact that even Perry’s published editions are flawed and incomplete becomes even harder to understand. For example, the score and part sets of Pastoral and Stabat Mater available for purchase are incomplete — I was up late the night before the recording project’s first rehearsal engraving a double bass part from the score of the Stabat Mater. What happened after Perry’s death to leave her compositions in such disarray? How does the music of a composer as successful and widely-performed as Julia Perry disappear from the stage like this?
First, no known estate was formed to care for Julia Perry’s works upon her death. As a result, in addition to being difficult to locate, many of her extant compositions only exist in manuscript form. Second, and more meaningfully, classical music’s performance and academic fields lack a common practice for reconstructing poorly notated and handwritten compositions for inclusion on the concert stage. Ensembles almost always program out of publishers’ catalogs or work directly with living composers, and do not regularly devote budget lines to producing their own editions of scores and parts for performances. In fact, this reality plagued Julia Perry during her life, as correspondence in the New York Philharmonic’s archives shows a contentious, months-long exchange between Perry and the orchestra’s librarians over the suitability of the parts she produced for the 1965 premiere of, Study. When dealing with dead composers with historically excluded identities, even performers and arts organizations that are inclined to address issues of equity rarely go to the lengths of re-engraving manuscripts.
Historically, the people who have most consistently performed such invaluable preservation work in the United States have been African-American. Going back at least as far as 1878 — when James Monroe Trotter published his chronicle of nineteenth century African-American classical musicians, Music and Some Highly Musical People — there is a long tradition of Black musicians and scholars, especially women, working on the margins of America’s most powerful and well-resourced music institutions to chronicle the history of African-American music, including centuries of achievement in classical idioms, to the fullest possible extent. Julia Perry participated in this tradition through her arrangements of spirituals, which are as important a part of her creative output as her concert pieces. Moreover, the most comprehensive scholarship documenting Perry’s life is also authored by Black women. Namely, Mildred Denby Green’s 1975 dissertation at the University of Oklahoma, A Study of the Life and Works of Five Black Women Composers in America, and her 1983 follow-up book, Black Women Composers: A Genesis, are critical sources for Perry’s biography and analysis of her works.
This reality, that the history of Black American composers, like Julia Perry, has been kept in some places, yet these musicians and their music remain obscure to mainstream classical music audiences in the United States, points to something more pernicious. A myth iterates throughout classical music’s past that purports music created by subjugated populations — women and/or people of color, as well as members of other identity groups — is neither widely-performed nor studied because it does not exist or, if it does, it is not worthy of attention from listeners, performers, and scholars. The truth, evidenced by centuries of documented cultural activity, is that this music does exist, has always been relatively accessible, but is consistently ignored or minimized by powerful groups, ostensibly because this music’s quality threatens the persuasiveness of cultural-historical narratives these people and institutions reinforce.
The music of Julia Perry fits into this pattern of exclusionary behavior, which extends at least as far back as the Renaissance. Dominant beliefs about the aesthetic trajectory of American concert music following World War Two contend that composers in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s wrote overly sophisticated and austere atonal music, creating an opportunity for subsequent generations to restore the appeal of newly-composed American music through aesthetics like, ‘neo-Romanticism and ‘post-minimalism’. An example of this view appears in the biography that appears on the enormously successful American composer John Adams’ personal website. Adams writes, “[my] music has played a decisive role in turning the tide of contemporary musical aesthetics away from academic modernism and toward a more expansive, expressive language, entirely characteristic of his New World surroundings.”
The compositional output of mid-century Black American composers, like Julia Perry, Ulysses Kay, George Walker, Undine Smith Moore, Arthur Cunningham, Olly Wilson, and many others, is typified by a variety of styles, from the most intense atonal techniques to Romantic tonality, and, therefore, challenges the history Adams advances in his artistic biography. The overall aesthetic change Adams claims to lead in the closing decades of the twentieth century can only exist if we ignore these Black composers, as recognizing their work means acknowledging the reality that Adams’ self-proclaimed innovations were already present in the field of American music composition before his career began. This is not to say John Adams led a cabal of performing arts organizations to rewrite history, only to demonstrate one way the most influential institutions and figures in American classical music are incentivized to reject inclusive practices in order to preserve their interests and power.
Abstract dynamics like this discursive struggle over the ownership of certain aesthetic developments couple with concrete issues of resource access and socio-political disenfranchisement. Julia Perry, again, plays a compelling role in our understanding of such phenomena as she enjoyed an enviably successful career spangled with numerous high-profile achievements. Yet, we cannot forget that the arguable peak of her career, the mid-1960s when she was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, coincides with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. As an African-American woman, Perry’s access to the polls was not fully protected until months after Study was performed on two concerts in New York. As I already noted, these programs also featured appearances by pianist Van Cliburn and violinist Itzahk Perlman. Thus, these performances symbolically showcase three rising stars in American classical music whose political agency could not have been more unequal at the time.
As a white musician and scholar working with the music of Julia Perry and other composers with identities different from my own, I do my best to remain cognizant of the delicate balance between amplifying these silenced compositional voices and subsuming their accomplishments for my own gain. The latter outcome is something I try to avoid at all costs, which played a role in ÆPEX’s partnerships with Brice Smith and Olivia Johnson to produce these Julia Perry recordings (Brice and Olivia are also extraordinary musicians, obviously), and involved them both in so many aspects of the production process. It is also for this reason that ÆPEX is thrilled to begin a partnership with the African Diaspora Music Project focused on the creation of new engravings of Julia Perry’s manuscripts and reconstructions of her incomplete print editions to facilitate even more performances and recordings in the future.
Led by world-renowned vocalist Louise Toppin, the African Diaspora Music Project is an exceptional organization that sees the imperative connection between research and performance in the network of solutions present-day American classical musicians pursue to address historical inequalities in our field. Like with the ÆPEX Anthology, and Brice and Olivia’s guest artist roles in ÆPEX’s recordings of Julia Perry’s Pastoral and Stabat Mater, I believe collaborating across identities with equal-status partnerships is critical to successfully pursuing the goals of social justice in music. Although I know these relationships do not prevent me from making mistakes in my work, these connections are as deeply fulfilling for me, on an interpersonal level, as they are quintessential to the research and performance projects in which I am involved.
