Since her death at 55, Julia Perry’s name has fallen into near obscurity. Perry was born in 1924 into a prominent family in segregated Lexington, Kentucky, but began her formal music training after relocating to Akron, Ohio. She went on to study at the Westminster Choir College, later winning two Guggenheim Fellowships and studying in Italy with Luigi Dallapiccola and at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, where she won the Prix Fontainebleau under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger. She toured Europe, conducted and gave lectures in Europe for the US Information Service.

Later in life while adjusting to a substantial disability following a stroke which left one side paralysed, Perry continued to compose, absorbing the experience of the civil rights movement and always echoing the musical influences of her childhood. Perry fervently composed until the end of her life despite being confined to a wheelchair for the final nine years. She taught herself to use her left hand and did not stop working even after she was hospitalised.

Ege commented on Perry’s piano concerto: “Note how her concerto is not in two movements, but in two speeds, as if she is playing with spacetime. The first speed, “Slow,” is, as Maestra Martinez calls it, “celestial.” Emerging out of a haze of strings and winds, the piano’s opening solo unfolds. The irregular time signatures evoke a suspended temporality. But the second speed, “Fast,” brings us back down to earth. Energetic rhythms seasoned with Afrodiasporic syncopations dance around the pulse. Here, the piano cadenzas are more virtuosic, as you might expect to hear in a more conventional concerto (like Doreen Carwithen’s). But Perry is experimenting more with colour than technique; the pianist must paint rather than play.”