Conference Agenda

Completed in 1976 but unperformed and unpublished until 2024, Quinary Quixotic Songs stands out among Julia Perry’s final works and remains one of her least examined. Scored for bass-baritone and an unusual chamber ensemble of flute, clarinet, viola, baritone horn, and piano, the five-movement song cycle sets Perry’s own surreal, cryptic texts. Although the title invokes Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the music stages a darker meditation on striving against injustice and human limitation, locating a “quixotic” impulse in sites as varied as an imprisoned poet and the spectacle of a bullfight.

This paper argues that Quinary Quixotic Songs offers unique insight into ongoing historiographic efforts to categorize Perry within neoclassicist, modernist, and postmodernist frameworks. This study engages Tammy Kernodle’s account of the “Black postmodern concert aesthetic” alongside Ryan Dohoney’s notion of “metamodernist drift,” both of which advance historiographic and ideological accounts of Julia Perry’s musical aesthetic. By focusing on one of Perry’s later, most experimental works, this paper extends and recalibrates their insights. Through close analysis, I demonstrate that although Perry deploys postmodern compositional techniques, like fragmentation, irony, and intertextuality, the work does not rupture into a play of surfaces or postmodern detachment. Each song articulates its own musico-structural logic and moves through dramatically different subjects, generating a dizzying heterogeneity. Fragmentation becomes the condition through which structural depth emerges. Beneath this fractured surface persists a fundamentally modernist utopian gesture: an ethical demand for striving.

Quinary Quixotic Songs offers a striking example of how Perry operated within a space of fugitive abstraction, where the work’s opacity unsettles hermeneutic containment yet betrays a distinctly modernist meditation on striving as a necessary, if unrealizable, utopian demand. Given Perry’s eclectic style, this work provides one instance of how Perry’s music resists totalizing narratives of race, gender, and conventional stylistic periodization in twentieth-century American concert music. This analysis thus contributes to the necessary recontextualization of Perry within ongoing historiographic debates demanded by her diverse output and suggests a model for the interpretation of Perry and other Black women composers of her generation.