William P. Perry
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William P. Perry is an American composer and television producer. Born in Elmira, New York in 1930, he attended Harvard University and studied with Paul Hindemith, Walter Piston and Randall Thompson. His music has been performed by the Chicago Symphony, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Detroit Symphony and the symphonic orchestras of Minnesota, Montreal and Hartford as well as the Vienna Symphony and other orchestras in Europe.
For twelve years, Perry was the music director and composer-in-residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he composed and performed as a pianist more than three hundred scores for the Museum's silent film collection. His subsequent television series, "The Silent Years" (1971-72) starring Orson Welles and Lillian Gish, won an Emmy Award.
For three years (1976-1978) he produced a poetry series for PBS called "Anyone for Tennyson?" starring Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Claire Bloom, William Shatner and Vincent Price among others. He produced and composed the scores for the Peabody Award-winning "Mark Twain Series" of feature films on PBS (1980-1985), and his Broadway musical, "Wind in the Willows", starring Nathan Lane, won him Tony nominations for both music and lyrics (1986).
Perry's dramatizations of the works of Mark Twain have included a staged musical biography that ran for nine summers (1987-1995) in Elmira, NY and Hartford, CT. His most recent symphonic compositions include the Jamestown Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (2007), written to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first permanent colony in America in Jamestown, Virginia.
