Harlem was once home to one of the most gifted and promising young Black composers of any generation, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004).
In this archival video from June 2019, WQXR radio host Terrance McKnight introduces the audience to the music of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, with an excerpt from his Sinfonietta No. 1 for Strings conducted By Ariel Rudiakov. This video was recorded live at Miller Theatre at Columbia University on May 31, 2019.
Named after the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), Perkinson attended the (old Harlem) High School of Music and Art in New York City and NYU. He later transferred to the Manhattan School of Music in West Harlem, where he received bachelor's and master's degrees. He later also studied at Princeton University. He studied conducting in the summers of 1960 at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and 1962, and 1963 in the Netherlands with Franco Ferrara and Dean Dixon, another noted Black conductor.
He was on the faculty of Brooklyn College (1959-1962) and was director of the Brooklyn Community Symphony Orchestra, an affiliate of the school's music department. "Perk", as he was known to friends, also sang as a baritone soloist in numerous New York City churches. Throughout his career, Perkinson advocated for the Black community and its performing artists in particular. Perkinson co-founded the Symphony of the New World, the first racially integrated orchestra in the United States, in New York, in 1965 and later became its music director. He was also music director of Jerome Robbins's American Theater Lab and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Coleridge-Taylor became something of a “cult figure” on the African-American classical-music scene.
Perkinson wrote a great deal of classical music, but was equally well-versed in jazz and popular music. He served briefly as pianist for drummer Max Roach’s quartet and wrote arrangements for Roach, Marvin Gaye, and Harry Belafonte and others. He composed music for films such as The McMasters (1970), Together for Days (1972), A Warm December (1973), Thomasine & Bushrod (1974), The Education of Sonny Carson (1974), Amazing Grace (1974), Mean Johnny Barrows(1976), and the documentary Montgomery to Memphis (1970) about Martin Luther King Jr. In 1970 he wrote incidental music for at least one episode of the US television show Room 222.
He finished his career at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, where Perkinson worked from 1998 until his death in 2004. He served as coordinator of performance activities there in 1998 and, a year later, became music director of the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble, a group dedicated to performing diverse musical styles.
During his time at Manhattan School of Music, he was said to have met and studied with the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. One can almost hear Stravinsky's influence in the first movement of Perkinson's Sinfonietta No. 1 for Strings. The piece was written in 1953 when the composer was just 21 years old. Like Stravinsky, he uses complex mixed meter changes, "tricky" unexpected syncopated rhythms, combined with his own unique and accomplished take on the neo-Baroque compositional style. Perkinson was a first-rate contrapuntalist, inspired by composers as diverse as Bach and Bartók.
“It is very difficult,” said the late Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson in answer to an interviewer’s question, “to say what black music really is.” Therein lies the dilemma for the modern African-American composer who cannot deny his rich cultural heritage but whose goals transcend that immediate heritage to embrace the whole world of the classics. He said the only uniquely black aspect of his music was “inspiration.” Only you can decide if the life you live is significantly black; no one can decide that for you, and I don’t think that it’s right for anyone to pass judgment on the nature of your involvement.” Robert A. Harris of Northwestern University states that in his opinion “Leonard Bernstein is the only other giant I know of who could do everything that ‘Perk’ could do.”
(Notes adapted from From Wikipedia, notes by Gregory Weinstein, and Kyle MacMillan, a Chicago-based arts journalist.)
Program notes were compiled and directly quoted from knowledgable sources online for educational purposes only.
For more of Perkinson's music check out www.cedillerecords.org/albums/coleridge-taylor-perkinson-a-celebration/
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The Harlem Chamber Players Inc., is an ethnically diverse collective of professional classical musicians dedicated to bringing high-caliber, affordable, accessible live music to people in the Harlem community and beyond.
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