Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson

Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson was born on the fourteenth of June 1932 — sources differ as to whether in Manhattan or in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, from which his family came. He was named by his mother, a pianist, church organist, and theater-company director, in honor of the Afro-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a naming that would prove a quiet prophecy of the life to follow.

Raised amid music, he graduated from New York's High School of Music and Art and studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music, earning his degrees there under Vittorio Giannini and Charles Mills. He pursued further study at Princeton University with Earl Kim and honed his conducting in summers abroad — at the Salzburg Mozarteum and under the maestros Dean Dixon and Franco Ferrara in the Netherlands.

In 1965 Perkinson helped found New York's Symphony of the New World, one of the first fully integrated orchestras in the United States, serving as its associate conductor and, in the 1972–73 season, its acting music director. He moved with rare freedom across classical music, jazz, dance, film, and television — writing and directing for the Negro Ensemble Company, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and arranging for artists such as Marvin Gaye, Harry Belafonte, and Max Roach.

From 1998 until his death he served at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago, leading its New Black Music Repertory Ensemble. He died in Chicago on the ninth of March 2004. A composer who refused every boundary set before him, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson is honored for a life that gave American music new range and lasting dignity.