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Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004) was an American composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist who operated across multiple genres including classical music. He was raised in a musical household and pursued music as a career path by the time he was a teenager. Perkinson's compositional style has been described as a combination of Baroque style counterpoint and American Romanticism with elements of folk music, blues, spirituals, and filled with rhythmic vitality. He composed and arranged innumerable works for jazz, R&B, and pop artists, ballet, theater, film, television, chorus, and instrumental groups ranging from solo to full orchestra.
RESOURCES
Worship: A Concert Overture is built around the Christian Doxology hymn in multiple inventive ways.
A wonderful live audio recording of Worship: A Concert Overture.
Like Worship: A Concert Overture, this piece uses an existing familiar tune as source material hidden in plain sight.
HIGHLIGHTS
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was named after African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) who himself was named after Ango-British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. None of them related in any way other than being great artists and having moms cool enough to name them after great artists!
Perkinson attended the "Fame" school in New York, the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art. He also studied at NYU and received bachelor and master degrees in composition from Manhattan School of Music. Perkinson independently continued studying composition and conducting at Berkshire Music Center in Massachusetts and at Princeton University, and spent three years training as a conductor at Salzburg’s Mozarteum and in the Netherlands.
Perkinson toured as pianist for drummer Max Roach’s jazz quartet and was music director and arranger for Roach, Lou Rawls, Marvin Gaye, and Harry Belafonte among others.
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson composed Worship: A Concert Overture in 2001 and revised it in 2002, just two years prior to his death.
Worship: A Concert Overture is a tautly constructed 6 minute piece of music in two sections - a slow introduction and an energetic quick Allegro.
In Worship: A Concert Overture, Perkinson uses the Christian Doxology hymn “Prase God, from whom all blessings flow” as source material from which to build the piece while also invoking an amalgam of styles using compound meters, syncopated rhythms, and the use of congas and other percussion instruments not typically featured in orchestral concert music.
A seat at the table: Consider & Discuss
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's compositional style was more adventurous than his more well known African-American composer forbears like William Grant Still or Florence Price. Johann Buis, a musicologist and colleague of Perkinson's describes his music as being an “in-between category... using a kind of modernistic language with a fairly strong image of dissonance, yet he also uses a jazz through-line that constantly informs a rhythmic vitality in his work that was extremely attractive.”
William Grant Still's compositions have been performed fairly consistently, if periodically, since their premieres. Florence Price's music fell nearly completely from memory but has been enjoying a welcome renaissance since major collections of unpublished works dating back to the early 1900s were discovered in 2009 and again in 2018.
Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was well respected by colleagues within his academic, research, performance, and composition circles but didn't achieve the level of fame or fortune someone of his level of productivity might suggest. He lamented to Buis once, regarding his work in other countries, “I could not really explain ... that no orchestra, no ensemble, no opportunities would come my way in the United States. The phone rang, and it was Max Roach on the line: ‘Perk, I’m booked for a tour to Japan, and I need a pianist. Would you come?’ His phone call came when I was broke and I needed to eat, and I went on this tour. The fact was that I did not or could not make headway in the United States and when opportunities did come my way, and they discovered that I was Black, these opportunities were withdrawn or modified.”
Composers encountering adversity is a familiar story - Ludwig van Beethoven grappling with deafness, Robert Schumann's mental health struggle - but gatekeeping by people of power and/or influence has been, and continues to be, extremely problematic. Women composers, like Nannerl Mozart (1751-1829) and Amy Beach (1867-1944) being barred from working by their fathers and husbands, or unable to publish under their own names like Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847), seems unthinkable in our contemporary era. How then is it true that barely 5% of concert music programming decisions go to compositions by women despite the documented and known five thousand or so women composers who have produced music for the concert stage throughout the Common Era? Works by the thousands of composers of color and from countries and cultures other than Europe (primarily Western Europe) and Russia are similarly rarely programmed or ignored altogether.
Who do you think is responsible for concert music programming selection? Who should or could be included in that responsibility? What role might the current or future audience play in this process?
Listen Critically!
Listen to the Colorado Symphony performance of Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson's Worship: A Concert Overture and again via multiple different recordings if possible. Take note of what you observe and how it ignites your curiosity to discover more music by Perkinson and other composers you may be encountering for the first time. Listen as well for the many and varied ways Perkinson uses the Doxology tune in this overture. How do these things draw you in as a listener and leave you wanting more?
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