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Composer
Ronald Perera's compositions include operas, song cycles, chamber, choral, and orchestral works, and several works for instruments or voices with electronic sounds. He is perhaps best known for his settings of texts by authors as diverse as Dickinson, Joyce, Grass, Sappho, Cummings, Shakespeare, Francis of Assisi, Melville, Ferlinghetti, Updike, and Henry Beston. Seven of his major pieces are represented on compact discs released in the late 1990s. Reviewing CRI CD 796 for Fanfare magazine, critic John Story writes, "Three Poems of Günter 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."
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. Ronald Perera has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, ASCAP, the National Association of Teachers of Singing, the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts, Harvard University, the MacDowell colony, the Paderewski Fund, the Bogliasco Foundation, and Meet the Composer. In 1975 he co-edited The Development and Practice of Electronic Music for Prentice-Hall. His music is published by E.C. Schirmer, Boosey and Hawkes, Music Associates of New York and Pear Tree Press Music Publishers. It is recorded principally on the Albany, CRI, and Opus One labels.
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. His String Quartet, commissioned by the South Mountain Association, was premiered by the Muir String Quartet in 2004. His children's opera, The Araboolies of Liberty Street, written for the Manhattan School of Music Opera Studio and Educational Outreach, premiered at the Opera Delaware Children's Opera Festival in Wilmington, March, 2002, and has received numerous performances in New York City schools, as well as with the Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia. His cantata, The Golden Door, based on Ellis Island archives, was premiered in New York by the New Amsterdam Singers in 1999 and has received subsequent performances by the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) Chamber Choir and the Chatham Chorale. His two-act opera S., based on the novel by John Updike, received a fully staged workshop performance in Northampton, MA, in 1995. 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 Univerity, 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.
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, Christopher Kendall, Amy Kaiser, Odaline de la Martinez, and Paul Callaway.
Perera has taught at Syracuse University, Dartmouth College, and, from 1971-2002, at Smith College, where he held the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Chair in Music. The composer lives in Northampton, MA.
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