Zenobia Powell Perry’s Piano Sonatina


This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum.

https://youtu.be/iRYQhfFDuOM


Zenobia Powell Perry (1908–2004) composed songs, orchestral music, chamber works, an opera, and piano pieces. As a child, she studied the piano with a student of R. Nathaniel Dett, and went on to study with Dett privately before attending the Tuskegee Institute to study education and music. After graduating, as Jeannie Gayle Pool says, “she headed a black teacher-training program, supervised in part by Eleanor Roosevelt, who became a friend, ally and mentor. . . . Additional studies in composition were with French composer Darius Milhaud, Allan Willman, and Charles Jones.”


Perry did not begin composing seriously until she was well into her 30s. She was more interested in teaching and composing for her students and for the ensembles at the institutions where she taught. Pool says, “Being black, Creek Indian, mid-western, as well as female, contribute to a fascinating combination of factors which make her music reflective of a unique perspective, full of originality and inventiveness. Although she did not seek fame as a composer, her goal was to serve her community as a musician.”


Piano Sonatina, sometimes referred to as Sonatine for Piano, was composed in 1962. This is a sometimes surprising work, very straightforward much of the time but with little bursts of emotion that are almost like cries from another voice, interrupting the flow for a second or two here and there. Like all of her music, Piano Sonatina is accessible, tonal, and melodic. Every time I listen to it, I hear more and enjoy it more.


My classical music post for today is Zenobia Powell Perry’s Piano Sonatina.

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