William Perry

William Perry is best known in the field of music for his work as a composer of soundtrack music -- although he has also written for the concert hall, and seen several of his works recorded. Born in Elmira, New York in 1930, he was a musically precocious child and, at age 15, produced and composed his first stage work, On the Double (1945). He later studied at Harvard under Paul Hindemith, Walter Piston, and Randall Thompson, and organized his own orchestra in Boston. Over the next several decades, Perry pursued several sometimes interlocking careers, in television -- where he later became a writer and producer -- and later with the Museum of Modern Art where, as their composer-in-residence and head of their music department, he wrote and performed new scores for several hundred classic silent films, among them The Beloved Rogue and The General. His scores were subsequently featured in the Emmy-winning television series The Silent Years. Later in the decade, he produced two award-winning series devoted to poetry, Anyone for Tennyson and The Master Poets, and he also co-wrote the score for a Tony nominated Broadway show, Wind in the Willows (1986). But Perry's greatest visibility has come from his close association with stage and screen adaptations of the work of Samuel Clemens. His affinity for the work of the author best known as Mark Twain was a natural one, going back to his birth -- Clemens was one of the most prominent historical citizens of Elmira, New York, Perry's birthplace. His score for the 1980 television production Life on the Mississippi was a rich, highly melodic body of music, steeped in 19th century sentiment and 20th century expressiveness -- Perry's music for subsequent productions, including The Mysterious Stranger, The Innocents Abroad, Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, followed a similar pattern, and in 1987 he drew many of these threads together in his stage work Mark Twain: A Musical Biography, which has found lasting popularity as a performance piece and a cast recording.
© Bruce Eder /TiVo