Biography
RONALD PERERA‘s (1941-2023) compositions include operas, song cycles, chamber, choral and orchestral works, and several works for instruments or voices with electronic sounds. He was perhaps best known for his settings of texts by authors as diverse as Dickinson, Joyce, Grass, Sappho, Cummings, Shakespeare, Francis of Assisi, Melville, Ferlinghetti and Updike. Several major pieces are represented on compact disc. Reviewing CRI CD 796 for Fanfare magazine, critic John Story writes, “Three Poems of Gunter Grass is, quite simply, one of the most haunting works of the last 25 years.” Reviewing The Outermost House on Albany Troy 314 he writes, “When he is on form, Ronald Perera is among the finest living combiners of words and music alive [sic]…The music is simply lovely.”
Writing in the notes for the CD Crossing the Meridian, Steven Ledbetter, program annotator for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, writes “Ronald Perera’s music is filled with color and imagery. This is as true of his purely instrumental music and his many vocal settings as it is of his works that add real-life sounds recorded on tape and of his synthesized electronic music. His vivid images are not designed to project some kind of pat program, but rather serve with great flexibility to underscore the emotional character of a work and of its changing emotional states, especially in settings of carefully chosen, strongly felt poetry.”
Perera studied composition with Leon Kirchner at Harvard and electronic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the University of Utrecht. He also worked independently with Randall Thompson in choral music and with Mario Davidovsky in electronic music. He has received awards or fellowships from Harvard University, the Paderewski Fund, the Goethe Institute, the MacDowell Colony, the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts, the National Association of Teachers of Singing, the Bogliasco Foundation, Meet the Composer, the National Endowment for the Arts and ASCAP. In 1975 he co-edited The Development and Practice of Electronic Music for Prentice-Hall. His music is published by E.C. Schirmer (ECS Publishing), Boosey and Hawkes and Pear Tree Press Music Publishers, and is recorded on the Albany, Navona, CRI and Opus One labels.
Works from the past decade include the song sets That We Were Gone on poems of Teasdale(2020) and The Music Makers (poems of Browning and Frost)(2017), Merrimack for mixed chorus, string quartet and piano on a text of Thoreau (2019) for the New England Classical Singers, When Music Sounds for mixed voices and piano on poems by de la Mare, Shelley and Dickinson (2015) commissioned by Harvard University and the Fromm Foundation, A Soldier’s Carol, mixed voices a cappella on a poem of Longfellow(2014)for the Harvard University Choir, the organ pieces Hymnos (2013) and Full Sun (2011) for organ commissioned by Christ Church, Springfield (MA) and Pipe Organ Encounters respectively, North Country on poems of Robert Frost for Mixed Chorus and Piano(2010)for the Da Camera Singers, Hildegard Magnificat for women’s chorus and organ(2016)for Smith College, and A Dickinson Set for mixed voices a cappella (2009)for the Chatham Chorale.
Highlighting some earlier compositions and premieres, his 2006 work Why I Wake Early, eight poems of Mary Oliver for mixed chorus, string quartet and piano, received its New England premiere with the Chatham Chorale of Cape Cod in November, 2007, and its New York premiere with the New Amsterdam Singers in March, 2008. His String Quartet, commissioned by the South Mountain Association, was premiered by the Muir Quartet in 2004.His children’s opera, The Araboolies of Liberty Street, commissioned by the Manhattan School of Music, was premiered in New York in 2002. His cantata, The Golden Door, based on Ellis Island archives, was premiered in New York by the New Amsterdam Singers in 1999. His two-act opera S., based on the novel by John Updike, received a fully staged workshop performance in Northampton, MA, in 1995; its opening scene was presented by artists of the Chicago Lyric Opera in the “New Works Sampler” of the 2001 convention of Opera America. In 1989 his two-act chamber opera, The Yellow Wallpaper, with libretto adapted from the Charlotte Perkins Gilman novella by Constance Congdon, premiered in Northampton. It received its New York premiere at the Manhattan School of Music in 1992 and was produced (Act I) at the University of New Hampshire in 2003 and at the Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University, in 2006. His vocal chamber work Crossing the Meridian, commissioned by the Boston Musica Viva, has been performed by Gerard Schwarz at Merkin Hall, by the Lontano Ensemble in London, and by the the Eastman Musica Nova in Rochester and the Twentieth Century Consort in Washington. Some other significant performances include Bright Angels at the Almeida Festival, London (1986), Chamber Concerto at the 1984 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Tolling at Alice Tully Hall (1980) and at the 12th Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique at Bourges (1984), Three Poems of Gunter Grass at the 1976 Holland Festival and in Berlin on the Boston Musica Viva’s European tour, and Reverberations at the 1974 Avignon Festival. His Mass for chorus and orchestra, which premiered in 1973 at the Washington National Cathedral, received its New York premiere in a new version with two-piano accompaniment in 1994 with the New York Virtuoso Singers. The Outermost House was premiered on Cape Cod in 1991 by the Chatham Chorale. It was first performed in New York in 1994 by the New Amsterdam Singers. Visions received its premiere with the Boston Musica Viva in 1997. Music for Flute and Orchestra has had performances by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony (1997) and the Springfield Symphony Orchestra (1999).
His music has been performed by such artists as Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Sanford Sylvan, John Aler, Elsa Charlston, Leonard Raver, Scott Nikrenz, Samuel Sanders, Roman Totenberg, Jane Bryden, Karen Smith Emerson, Marni Nixon, James Maddalena, Douglas Perry, Jon Humphrey and Linda Hirst and under the direction of conductors including Gerard Schwarz, Richard Dufallo, David Gilbert, Edwin London, Theodore Antoniou, Richard Pittman, David Stock, Harold Rosenbaum, David Hodgkins, Gil Rose, Christopher Kendall, Amy Kaiser, Odaline de la Martinez, Paul Callaway and Edward Elwyn Jones.
Perera taught at Syracuse University, Dartmouth College and, from 1971 until 2002, at Smith College, where he held the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Chair in Music.
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