Zenobia Powell Perry

Zenobia Powell Perry (October 3, 1908 – January 17, 2004)[1] was an American composer, professor and civil rights activist.

[2] She taught in a number of historically black colleges and universities and composed in a style that writer Jeannie Gayle Pool called "music with clear, classic melodies.

[4] As a child, Perry met Booker T. Washington and sang for him at his appearance in Boley on August 22, 1915, where he "declared she was a future Tuskegegian.

"[5] Perry took piano lessons as a child with Mayme Jones, who had been taught by Robert Nathaniel Dett.

[6] After her return to Boley, Dett visited her family to ask them to send her to the Hampton Institute, where she could study with him.

[8] After Tuskegee, Perry became part of a teacher training program for Black Americans that was headed by Eleanor Roosevelt.

[8] From 1952 to 1954, Perry worked on her master's degree in music composition at Wyoming University, where she studied under Allan Arthur Willman,[5] Darius Milhaud[8] and Charles Jones.

[5] Two years later, she held a faculty position at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB), where she remained until 1955.

[10] Perry's music is classical and "incorporates contrapuntal, tonal, mild dissonance, with some jazz and folk influence.

[1] One of her most widely performed pieces is Threnody, a song cycle composed for her daughter set to the poetry of Donald Jeffrey Hayes.

[13] Zenobia Powell Perry's papers are held at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College in Chicago.

[16] Tawawa House: A Musical Drama in Two Acts (soloists, SATB choir, chamber orchestra), 1985; revised 2014 Choral Suite No.

2 Times Seven Ties Teeta Sonatine Soliloquy Round and Round Rhapsody Promenade Pavanne Nocturne A Jazz Trifle Flight Childhood Capers Blaize Character Matters Orrin and Echo Suite from Tawawa House (piano 4-hands) In 1981, Perry's daughter soprano Janis-Rozena Peri performed the song cycle Threnody at Carnegie Recital Hall.