William P. Perry

William P. Perry
William P. Perry
Born	1930 Elmira, New York
Occupation	Composer, Television producer

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 Cincinnati, Minnesota, Montreal, Calgary and Hartford as well as the Vienna Symphony, the Rome Philharmonic, the Slovak Philharmonic, the RTÉ National Symphony of Ireland 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 two hundred scores for the Museum's silent film collection. His subsequent PBS television series, "The Silent Years" (1971,1975) hosted by Orson Welles and Lillian Gish, won an Emmy Award. Perry is often credited with having played a major role in the revival of interest in classic silent films.

For three years (1976–1978) he produced a national poetry series for PBS called "Anyone for Tennyson?", starring Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Claire Bloom, William Shatner and Vincent Price among others. Fifty programs were presented over three seasons with more than three hundred poets represented. From these programs, he later developed and produced the four-part DVD series, "The Poetry Hall of Fame", which he also hosted.

He was executive producer and composed the music for the Peabody Award-winning "Mark Twain Series" of feature films on PBS (1980–1985). These films, produced by Perry's Great Amwell Company in association with the Nebraska ETV Network, also won five Cine Golden Eagle Awards. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut introduced the series, which began with "Life on the Mississippi" and culminated with a four-hour adaptation of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." This version for the first time emphasized the darker realities of the book.

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