Julia Perry

Julia Amanda Perry was born on the twenty-fifth of March 1924 in Lexington, Kentucky, a daughter of the physician Dr. Abraham Perry. While she was still a child, the family moved north to Akron, Ohio, where her early gifts in voice, violin, and piano were nurtured. From these beginnings she carried a rare double inheritance: the disciplines of the European concert tradition and the deep wellsprings of her African-American heritage.

Perry studied at Westminster Choir College from 1943 to 1948, earning both bachelor's and master's degrees, and continued at the Berkshire Music Center and the Juilliard School. Her ambitions then drew her across the Atlantic, where she studied with Luigi Dallapiccola in Italy and Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and refined her craft during summers at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena.

Her masterwork, the Stabat Mater of 1951, scored for contralto and string orchestra and dedicated to her mother, remains a work of grave and luminous beauty. On the strength of such achievement she was twice honored with Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1954 and 1956. Her catalogue grew to embrace symphonies, operas, and concertos, an output of striking range and resolve.

In her later years a series of strokes left her partially paralyzed, yet she taught herself to write with her left hand rather than surrender the pen. Julia Perry died in Akron on the twenty-fourth of April 1979. Long overshadowed, her voice endures — a composer who wrote against every silence, and whose music now returns to the light it was always owed.