Zenobia Powell Perry (1908–2004)
Zenobia Powell was born in Boley, Oklahoma, a town that had been incorporated just a few years earlier. The population consisted of predominantly Black descendants of people enslaved by the Muscogee Creek indigenous people.
One of Zenobia Powell’s grandfathers had been enslaved, and he was still alive when she was young. It was from him that she first heard traditional African American spirituals. She also learned piano and violin, studying privately with African American composer Robert Nathaniel Dett and then at the Tuskegee Institute with William L. Dawson, another early African American composer.
Perry spent most of her life teaching music and only came to composition later. This Sonatine for Clarinet and Piano is from 1963:
One of Zenobia Powell Perry’s most performed compositions is Threnody (1969 to 1972), a song cycle of five settings of poems by the rather obscure Harlem Renaissance poet Donald Jeffrey Hayes (1904–1991). Here are their texts:
“Threnody”
Let happy throats be mute;
Only the tortured reed
Is made a flute!
Only the broken heart can sing
And make of song
A breathless and lovely thing!
Only the sad-only the tortured throat
Contrives of sound
A strangely thrilling note!
Only the tortured throat can fling
Beauty against the sky-
Only the broken heart can sing
Not asking why!!!
“Alien”
Do not stifle me with the strange scent
Of low growing mountain lilies—
Do not confuse me
With the salubrious odor of honeysuckle!
I cannot separate in my mind
Sweetness from sweetness—
Mimosa from wild white violets;
Magnolia from Cape jasmine!
I am from north tide country,
I can understand only the scent of seaweed;
Salt marsh and scrub pine
Riding on the breath of an amorous fog!
O do not confuse me
With sweetness upon sweetness;
Let me escape safely from this gentle madness—
Let me go back to the salt of sanity
In the scent of the sea . . . !
“Benediction”
Not with my hands
But with my heart I bless you:
May peace forever dwell
Within your breast!
May Truth’s white light
Move with you and possess you—
And may your thoughts and words
Wear her bright crest!
May Time move down
Its endless path of beauty
Conscious of you
And better for your being!
Spring after Spring
Array itself in splendor
Seeking the favor
Of your sentient seeing!
May hills lean toward you
Hills and windswept mountains
And trees be happy
That have seen you pass—
Your eyes dark kinsmen
To the stars above you—
Your feet remembered
By the blades of grass. . . . !
“Poet”
No rock along the road but knows
The inquisition of his toes;
No journey’s end but what can say:
He paused and rested here a day!
No joy is there that you may meet
But what will say: His kiss was sweet!
No sorrow but will sob to you:
He knew me intimately too. . . . !
“Pastourelle”
Walk this mile in silence —-
Let no sound intrude
Upon the vibrant stillness
Of this solitude!
Let no thought be spoken
Nor syllable be heard
Lest the spell be broken
By the thunder of a word!
Here, such matchless wonder is
As might tear apart —-
Should the lip give tone
To the fullness of the heart…!
Her 1985 opera Tawawa House is set in 1852 at a real-life hotel in Ohio that became a stop on the underground railroad and was later the site of Wilberforce College, the first black-owned college in the United States. This haunting aria from Tawawa House is entitled “Up Over My Head (I See Freedom in the Air)”: