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 Minnesota, Montreal and Hartford as well as the Vienna Symphony and other orchestras in Europe. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... Location in Chemung County in the state of New York Coordinates: Country United States State New York County Chemung County Government  - Mayor John S. Tonello (D) Area  - City  7. ... Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Founded in 1636,[2] Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. ... Paul Hindemith (16 November 1895 – 28 December 1963) was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor. ... Walter Hamor Piston Jr. ... Randall Thompson (April 21, 1899 - July 9, 1984) was an American composer. ...

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 three hundred scores for the Museum's silent film collection. His subsequent television series, "The Silent Years" (1971-72) starring Orson Welles and Lillian Gish, won an Emmy Award. This article contains a trivia section. ... Lillian Diana de Guiche (October 14, 1893 – February 27, 1993), was an Oscar-nominated American actress, better known as Lillian Gish. ... 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 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). Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was a highly acclaimed Academy Award-winning American film actor, best known for his roles as plain-speaking idealists. ... John Uhler Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001), better known as Jack Lemmon, was one of the most award-winning American actors of his generation. ... Claire Bloom (born Patricia Claire Blume on February 15, 1931) is a British film and stage actress. ... William Shatner (born on March 22, 1931) is a Canadian actor who gained fame for his starring role as Captain James Tiberius Kirk of the USS Enterprise in the television show Star Trek from 1966 to 1969 and in seven of the subsequent movies. ... Vincent Leonard Price Jr. ... The Wind in the Willows is a classic of childrens literature by Kenneth Grahame. ... Nathan Lane (born February 3, 1956) is a Screen Actors Guild Award and Tony Award-winning American actor and comedian of the stage and screen. ...

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. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),[1] better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, writer, and lecturer. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ...