Julia Perry

Julia Amanda Perry was born on the twenty-fifth of March 1924 at Lexington, Kentucky, the daughter of Abraham W. Perry — a physician — and America Williams Perry, the daughter of a Lexington pastor. The family moved to Akron, Ohio in 1934, and she completed the Akron public schools through the Central High School in 1942.

She was admitted at eighteen to the Westminster Choir College at Princeton, New Jersey, and completed the Bachelor of Music in 1947 and the Master of Music in 1948 in voice and composition.

She took the Tanglewood Fellowship at the Berkshire Music Center under Luigi Dallapiccola in the summer of 1951, the Guggenheim Fellowship in composition in 1954 and 1956 — among the first Black women to win a Guggenheim in composition — the Fontainebleau Conservatory under Nadia Boulanger in 1952, and the Accademia Chigiana at Siena under Luigi Dallapiccola again from 1952 to 1956.

She completed in 1951 the chamber-orchestral Stabat Mater on the medieval Latin liturgical text — a setting for contralto soloist and string orchestra in ten movements that integrates the recitative declamation of Italian neo-classical opera with the harmonic vocabulary of post-Webern serialism. The Carnegie Hall American Composers Concert under Howard Hanson premiered the Stabat Mater on the eleventh of December 1954.

She gave the European premiere of the Stabat Mater at the Casino Municipal at Cannes on the third of September 1957, on the first State Department–American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers European Cultural Exchange Tour, of which she was the first African American woman composer-conductor.

She composed across the following twenty-five years twelve symphonies, three operas — among them The Bottle (1953) and The Cask of Amontillado (1954) — and approximately fifty smaller works.

She suffered a stroke in 1973 that paralysed her right side. She continued composing with the left hand for the remaining six years of her life.

She died at Akron, Ohio on the twenty-ninth of April 1979 of complications of stroke, at fifty-five.

She is honored here as the first African American composer of the State Department European Exchange.