Brownbag Concerts | Program Notes

Program Notes

October 1, 2003

Composer and pianist ZENOBIA POWELL PERRY was born on October 3, 1908, to a well-educated, middle-class family. Her father, Calvin Bethel Powell, was a black physician, and her mother, Birdie Lee Thompson, was Creek Indian and black. Originally trained in piano by a local teacher, Mayme Jones, who had been a student of black pianist-composer R. Nathaniel Dett, Perry went, in 1931, to study music with Dett in Rochester, New York. Brief studies with Cortez Reece at Langston University in Oklahoma, encouraged her to think seriously about composition. Later she went to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she assisted the famous black choir director, arranger, and composer William L. Dawson. After completing her degree, she headed a black teacher-training program, supervised in part by Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a friend, ally and mentor and sponsored her graduate studies in education in Colorado. Additional studies in composition were with French composer Darius Milhaud, Allan Willman, and Charles Jones at the University of Wyoming and Aspen Conference on Contemporary Music in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Her first university faculty position was at Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College [A.A.M.& N.] (later called University of Arkansas, Pine Bluff), from 1947 to 1955. From 1955 until 1982, she was a faculty member and composer--in-residence at Central State University, Wilberforce, Ohio, where she is now Faculty Emerita. Her compositions have been performed by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, West Virginia University Band and Orchestra, and other performing ensembles, as well as by many singers. Her opera, Tawawa House, based on the history of Wilberforce, Ohio, completed with a commission by the Ohio Arts Council/Ohio Humanities Joint Program, was premiered in 1987.

Her hometown, the all black town of Boley, Oklahoma, provided a lifetime of inspiration and material for her work as a composer, long after the town, known for its black ownership, self-governance and autonomy, had been destroyed by Jim Crow politics. The history of Oklahoma and in general, the history of the United States, in the early 20th century, as it related to race relations, had a tremendous impact of Zenobia Perryıs life. The philosophical outlook and political activism of Booker T. Washington, with whom she had a life-long family connection, was a major influence in her life and the institutions where she studied and served as faculty and administrator.

This concert is part of a Zenobia Powell Perry 95th Birthday Ohio Concert Tour that includes concerts in Los Angeles, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati and Wilberforce.