WILLIAM PERRY

William 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 more than
one hundred scores for the Museum's silent film collection. His subsequent television series, "The Silent Years" (1971, 1975) 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 later developed and produced the four-part DVD series, "The Poetry Hall of Fame", which he also hosted.

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. It was recently recorded by Naxos Records with Yehuda Hanani as soloist and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland conducted by William Eddins.

William Perry's music can also be found on the Opus, Premier and Bridge Records labels. It is published by Trobriand Music Company.

Perry's background includes directorial and production experience in the formative years of television, writing script material for Lux Video Theatre and working with Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason and other entertainment icons. He directed the first color commercial to be broadcast live coast-to-coast and the first musical commercial ever produced and broadcast on videotape.