Julia Perry Symposium
Scholars, performers, and advocates of Julia Perry and her legacy will present research and recent developments in recovering her life and work.
Julia Perry Symposium
Friday, September 27, 2024 @ 3pm
Pillsbury Theatre, 560 Music Center
Round Table Discussion on Julia Perry hosted by Christina Smiley
List of participants:
Christina Smiley, host
Lucia Bradford, performer
Samantha Ege, scholar & performer
Louise Toppin, scholar & performer
Gayle Murchison, scholar
Join us for an engaging Round Table Discussion that delves into the life and work of renowned composer Julia Perry. This event will feature a panel of esteemed performers and scholars who specialize in Perry's music. The discussion will explore key topics such as the recovery of Perry's works, the legal challenges involved, and the unique experience of performing her music. Additionally, the panel will examine Perry's place within recent research on Black musical modernism. Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions and gain deeper insights into Perry’s enduring legacy and influence. Don’t miss this chance to engage with the world of Julia Perry and celebrate her contributions to music!
WashU Music Guest Lecture Series
Lectures on Julia Perry
Saturday, September 28, 2024
Pillsbury Theatre, 560 Music Center
1 pm
Samantha Ege | Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton
Title: “From Black Renaissance Repertoire to the Afromodernisms of Julia Perry”
1:30 pm
Louise Toppin | University Distinguished Professor of Diversity and Social Transformation and Professor of Music (Voice), at The University of Michigan
Title: “By the Sea: Julia Perry as singer and composer”
2:00 pm
Gayle Murchison | Associate Professor of Music at the College of William & Mary
Title: "Unto the Generations: Julia Perry as Modernist"
—Break—
3:00 pm
Ryan Dohoney | Professor of Musicology and core faculty in Comparative Literary Studies and Critical Theory at Northwestern University
Title: “Julia Perry's Metamodernist Drift”
3:30 pm
Kendra Preston Leonard | Independent Scholar
Title: "Gender and Cold War Anxieties in Julia Perry’s The Selfish Giant"
Dr. Samantha Ege
Samantha Ege (she/her) is a musicologist, pianist, and senior research fellow at the University of Southampton. She is the author of South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago’s Classical Music Scene. Her albums feature world-premiere recordings of music by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Helen Hagan, Undine Smith Moore, and Julia Perry.
Title “From Black Renaissance Repertoire to the Afromodernisms of Julia Perry”
Abstract
If African American concert culture in the first half of the twentieth century was encapsulated in the era of the Black Renaissance—a time of rebirth that encompassed the politics of respectability, racial uplift, and composers such as Florence Price, William Grant Still, and William Dawson—then the post-war period marked the transition from rebirth to a cultural coming of age. Therein, a bold Black aesthetic emerged where experimentation was the theme, as Guthrie P. Ramsey and Tammy L. Kernodle argue in their respective work on “Afro-modernism” and the “Black postmodern concert aesthetic in Cold War-Era America.” This presentation delves into continuities and divergences, culminating in a discussion of Samantha Ege's world premiere recording of Julia Perry's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in Two Uninterrupted Speeds on her forthcoming album Maestra.
Dr. Louise Toppin
Louise Toppin has received critical acclaim for her operatic, orchestral, oratorio, and recital performances worldwide. Represented by Joanne Rile Artist Management, she toured in "Gershwin on Broadway" with pianist Leon Bates and Bill Brown. She has recorded more than eighteen CDs of primarily American music including Songs of Illumination, (Centaur Records), and on Albany Records Ah love, but a day, He’ll Bring it to Pass, and La Saison des fleurs.
She has published 13 collections of music by African American composers including An Anthology of African and African Diaspora Songs, and Rediscovering Margaret Bonds.
Recent performances include: the world premiere of Julia Perry’s Frammenti dalla lettere with the Akron Symphony Orchestra and performances with Julia Bullock and the New World Symphony. She co-curated and sang a festival of Black Music in Hamburg, Germany with Thomas Hampson and Larry Brownlee, sang a recital on Harry Burleigh for Oxford Lieder Festival (England), performance at the U.S. Capitol for Congress and President Obama, performed as soloist with Camerata Romeu (Cuba) and for the opening of the Smithsonian’s African American Heritage Museum (Washington, D.C.)
She has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered (Margaret Bonds); co-hosted the Minnesota Orchestra “Listening Project” annually, and hosts her show Conversations in African American music. She has been a guest on many college campuses recently including Cincinnati Conservatory, Oberlin, Harvard, Yale, and the Cherubino Conservatory in Florence, Italy. Cofounder of the George Shirley Vocal Competition on repertoire by African American art song, and Videmus (non-profit organization that promotes the concert repertoire of African American composers). She founded the Africandiasporamusicproject.org research tool to locate the repertoire of composers of the African Diaspora from the 1600s to the present.
Previously, Dr. Toppin was the Distinguished University Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is currently University Distinguished Professor of Diversity and Social Transformation and Professor of Music (Voice) at The University of Michigan. For more www.louisetoppin.com.
Title “By the Sea: Julia Perry as singer and composer”
Abstract
One of Julia Perry's most recognizable works is her Stabat Mater for voice and orchestra in which she appeared as both the alto soloist and composer. Because of her training and ability as both composer and singer, she had a special affinity for the voice. Her vocal output that has been uncovered is relatively small, yet it reveals a composer of breadth and songs of high artistic value.
Dr. Gayle Murchison
Gayle Murchison is Associate Professor of Music at William and Mary. Her most recent publications include book chapters on Nadia Boulanger in the US, music in Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Woman, and Mary Lou Williams’s Girl Stars. She is the author of The American Musical Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetic of Copland’s New American Music, the Early Works, 1921-1938 (The University of Michigan Press, 2012). Her research interests focus on African American and Global African diasporic music ranging from Mary Lou Williams, William Grant Still, and the music of social and cultural movements (such as the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights Movements, and, the music of Zap Mama and Afro-European studies). She served as editor of Black Music Research Journal 2014-2019. She has recently been appointed as co-editor of the international journal, Jazz Perspectives. The recipient of a British Academy Visiting Professorship, Murchison is currently authoring a book on Mary Lou Williams in Europe, 1952-1954.
Title “Unto the Generations: Julia Perry as Modernist ”
Dr. Ryan Dohoney
Ryan Dohoney (he/him) is Professor of Musicology and core faculty in Comparative Literary Studies and Critical Theory at Northwestern University. He is the author of Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel (Oxford 2019) and Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde (Bloomsbury Academic 2022). He was the guest editor of and contributor to a special issue of Tempo (2022) devoted to the work of Joan La Barbara. He is currently writing a book on Julius Eastman’s queer collaborations in New York City in the 1970s and 80s.
Title “Julia Perry's Metamodernist Drift”
Abstract
The resurgence of interest in the music of Julia Perry has provoked a problem of categories for critics. The most commonly reached-for adjective has been "neoclassical"—a term that has reactionary connotations and makes her music intelligible by yoking it to the work of Stravinsky and Copland. Perry's experience of descriptive reduction is of a piece with critical response to other resurgent Black musicians from the 20th century. Julius Eastman is case in point; his music has been consistently described as "minimalist" even as much (if not the majority) of his music evinces, as Perry's does, myriad techniques and a plurality of aesthetic commitments. Such attempts to assimilate Black musicians' creative work to known categories may simply be instances of critical laziness yet speak to a broader tendency among musicologists to assume that we know what modernism was. Its givenness is such that we can plug any and all musicians into its categorical schemes. In this talk I assert the contrary, that we don't yet know what modernism was, but Julia Perry might help us figure it out. To that end, I focus on works composed during Perry's time abroad in Siena, Italy: the Frammenti dalle lettere di Santa Caterina and Six Contrasts, each of which thematizes questions of resistant speech and exile in a stark modernist musical language based at least in part on a personal development of serial technique. If twelve-tone music was among the master's tools, Perry shows that she might yet build her own house with it. Zooming out, I reframe Perry's musical poetics as a form of metamodernism: a syncretic critical praxis to which no form of human creativity was alien. Building on the work of Nigerian art history and artist Moyo Okediji, I take metamodernism to be a decolonial term that draws our attention to the ways in which so-called modernity is unequally distributed among or even denied to those clearly embroiled in its processes. I argue that Perry's metamodernism takes the form of "drift"—a refusal to commit to a single aesthetic stance. To drift is to take fugitive action born of dislocation and diaspora, movements that were on the one had enforced through the middle passage of Perry's ancestors and on the other by her expatriation to Europe in the 1950s. Perry's drift—her generous syncretism demonstrated in Frammenti and elsewhere—points to a way that we might reconstruct modernism's universality but this time from the standpoint of Blackness.
Dr. Kendra Preston Leonard
Kendra Preston Leonard is a musicologist and music theorist whose work focuses on women and music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and music and screen history. She is the founder and Executive Director of the Silent Film Sound and Music Archive and the founder of the Julia Perry Working Group. She is the author of six scholarly books, numerous book chapters and articles, and scholarly editions; and the contributing editor or co-editor of three edited collections. She has been a research fellow at the Newberry Library, the Harry Ransom Center, the American Music Research Center, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She is the recipient of the Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music; the International Alliance for Women in Music’s Pauline Alderman Award; the Dena Epstein Award for Archival and Library Research from the Music Library Association; the Janet Levy Award from the American Musicological Society; the Society for American Music Sight and Sound Subvention; and the inaugural Judith Tick Fellowship from the Society for American Music. She holds a PhD from the University of Sunderland (UK).
Title "Gender and Cold War Anxieties in Julia Perry’s The Selfish Giant"
Abstract
Julia Perry (1924-1979) first achieved recognition as a composer for her religious works, including spirituals and her Stabat Mater (1951), which remains one of her best-known pieces. Perry traveled and studied extensively in Europe in the 1950s, serving as a lecturer and conductor for US Information Service events, and, after returning to the US in 1960, she became involved in and inspired by the civil rights movement. For her 1964 work The Selfish Giant: an Opera in III Acts (later re-subtitled A Sacred Musical Fable in III Acts), Perry wrote a libretto that weaves together Oscar Wilde’s Christian children’s allegory The Selfish Giant with contemporary adult fears about the Cold War, economic markets, militarism, and misogyny. Perry uses these fears to communicate her own views on social issues such as traditional gender roles, the differences in education and religion between the US and the USSR; the effects of capitalism on society; and attitudes towards queerness. Here I analyze The Selfish Giant as a reflection of Perry’s international experiences as a Black American, Cold War-era anxieties, and her desire for hope, informed by the Christian activism of leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. I further explain the ways in which Perry uses her trademark idiom of limited pitch-class cell serial minimalism to further deepen her expression of and experiences with these issues. Julia Perry’s 1964 work The Selfish Giant weaves together Oscar Wilde’s Christian allegory with original scenes that speak to Cold War fears about economic markets, militarism, and misogyny. Perry uses her trademark idioms of limited pitch-class cell serialism and minimalism in addressing faith and her views on social issues including traditional gender roles, the differences in education and religion between the US and the USSR; and the effects of capitalism on society. I analyze the opera as a reflection of Perry’s experiences as a Black American amid common Cold War-era anxieties, and her desire for hope and civil rights.
Christina Smiley
Christina Smiley is a 3rd-year PhD student in musicology at Washington University in St. Louis and 2024-25 CRE2 Race & Ethnicity Scholar. Prior to attending WashU, she studied music and communication studies, obtaining her associate and bachelor’s degrees at Indian River State College and the University of Miami, respectively. Christina is interested in the intersections of race, class, gender, theology, literature, and politics in African American sacred music during the 20th century. More specifically, her emerging scholarship observes the melding of the sacred and secular in non-idiomatic sacred choral works by Black composers, considering the traces of radical Black resistance and concurrent Black socio-political paradigms. Her research interests also include African American participation in and performance of European classical music, global music history and intercultural exchange, and esotericism and transcendence in gospel, jazz, and soul genres. Apart from her scholarly pursuits, Christina is an active musician, performing in classical, gospel, jazz, and musical theatre arenas. In her free time, she enjoys trying new foods, writing poetry and novels, composing music, sewing, traveling, and streaming good TV shows.
With kind cooperation of the Estate of Julia Perry, Akron, Ohio