Coleridge Taylor Perkinson

African American composer, arranger, and performer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was active in classical music, jazz, and pop. In addition to chamber music and keyboard pieces, he composed large orchestral and choral works. Perkinson was born on June 14, 1932. Sources differ as to his birthplace; the New York Public Library, which holds his personal papers, gives it as Winston-Salem, North Carolina, but other sources indicate Manhattan, New York. His mother was a piano teacher and church organist, and he was named after composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Perkinson grew up at least partly in New York, attending the High School of Music and Art. There, he studied composition and conducting and shared the school's LaGuardia Prize in 1949. Perkinson went on to New York University, majoring in education, but after two years, he moved to the Manhattan School of Music for composition studies with Vittorio Giannini and Charles Mills; he also studied at Princeton University with Earl Kim. Perkinson earned a master's degree in 1953 at the Manhattan School of Music, where his classmates included jazz musicians Max Roach, Herbie Mann, and Randy Weston. Perkinson was active in jazz and played piano in Roach's band for a time, and worked with several other prominent jazz musicians. He studied conducting in the Netherlands and Austria in the early '60s. Perkinson co-founded and conducted the Symphony of the New World in New York in 1965, later serving as music director. The Symphony was the first racially integrated classical orchestra in the U.S. He also served as music director for the American Theater Lab and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater; for the latter, he composed the ballet For Bird, With Love. Perkinson composed scores for films, including A Warm December (1973), Thomasine & Bushrod (1974), and Mean Johnny Barrows (1976), as well as for one or more episodes of the television series Room 222. Perkinson wrote pop arrangements for Marvin Gaye and Harry Belafonte, and in the 1970s, he was one of a group of arrangers who developed a richer orchestral sound in the R&B genre. His classical compositions include two Sinfoniettas for strings, Grass: Poem for piano, strings, and percussion (1973), and the choral work Fredome/Freedom (1970), as well as various chamber and keyboard works. They show the influence of Hindemith, Bartók, and Samuel Barber but also include African American elements. In later life, Perkinson directed the Center for Black Music Research and the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble at Columbia College in Chicago, where he died on March 9, 2004. His classical works have been only sparsely recorded, but his String Quartet No. 1 ("Calvary") appeared on the 2023 Catalyst Quartet album Uncovered: Vol. 3.
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