Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was born on the fourteenth of June 1932 at Manhattan, the son of George Perkinson — a Trinidadian-born hospital orderly — and Vivian Perkinson, a stage performer of the Harlem Lafayette Theatre circuit, who named the child for the Anglo-African composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (placed in this archive). He was raised in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem.

He was placed at thirteen at the High School of Music & Art at Manhattan and at eighteen in 1950 at the Manhattan School of Music under Charles Mills and Vittorio Giannini, completing the Bachelor of Music in 1953 and the Master of Music in 1954. He took further study at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood under Lukas Foss and at the Mozarteum at Salzburg under Dean Dixon in conducting.

He was named in 1965 co-founder and associate conductor of the Symphony of the New World — the first racially integrated American symphony orchestra of professional rank, founded by the cellist Kermit Moore in response to the de facto segregation of the New York Philharmonic and the other major American orchestras of the period — and held the position until 1975.

He was named in 1969 principal conductor and music director of the orchestra of the Negro Ensemble Company at the Saint Marks Theatre, Off-Broadway, the position he held for eight years until 1977.

He composed across the following thirty-five years over sixty works for the concert hall and the stage — among them the Sinfonietta No. 1 for strings (1953), the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1956), the Lamentations (Black/Folk Song Suite) for solo cello (1973) — written for the cellist Sanford Allen — and the orchestral Generations (1981).

He served additionally as music director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater between 1970 and 1973 and arranged for the Ailey company three principal works including Cry (1971).

He died at Chicago on the ninth of March 2004 of a heart attack while in residence at the Columbia College Chicago, at seventy-one.

He is honored here as the co-founder of the Symphony of the New World.