photo: Karissa Van Tassel


Connecticut native Scott Perkins enjoys a multifaceted career as an international prize-winning composer, a versatile performer, an award-winning scholar, and a music professor at California State University, Sacramento. Praised by critics from publications including the Washington Post (“dramatic,” “colorful”) and the Washington Times (“perfectly orchestrated,” “haunting,” “a remarkable and welcome musical surprise”), his work has been commissioned by organizations ranging from the Washington National Opera to the American Guild of Organists and has been performed throughout North America and Europe. He has collaborated with musical and non-musical artists, including Tony Award-winning playwrights, Emmy-winning filmmakers, and celebrated poets. His music has been released by Navona Records, and he is published by E. C. Schirmer, Augsburg Fortress, and Paraclete Press.

Scott earned his PhD in composition at the Eastman School of Music, where his primary teacher was Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. He holds master’s degrees in both music theory and music theory pedagogy from Eastman, and he has a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in music theory and composition from Boston University.

News

November 19, 2018

THE INSIDE STORY: Scott Perkins and WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH

Albums

Whispers of Heavenly Death

Release Date: November 9, 2018
Catalog Number: NV6198
21st Century
Vocal Music
Piano
Voice
First up in this compelling collection is a selection of Walt Whitman's oeuvre, including the work that inspired the album's title, which Perkins' music hauntingly elucidates as the lament of a soul hovering on the brink between life and death. Intriguingly, the composer preserves the mood for the Holy Sonnets by John Donne, a Petrarch-style, English Renaissance collection of sonnets auguring the later Baroque period's preoccupation with the contrast between carnality and mortality.

The Stolen Child

Release Date: January 13, 2017
Catalog Number: NV6067
21st Century
Vocal Music
Choir
In THE STOLEN CHILD, Scott Perkins builds vast and stunning worlds out of a handful of voices. Vibrant, facile, and confident, Perkins’ choir writing is state-of-the-art and makes a modern musical statement while retaining a clear attachment to choral music’s longstanding tradition. To this end, Perkins’ compositions seem to balance the fluid and direct expression of late Renaissance a cappella masterpieces, while also possessing a decidedly contemporary approach to timbre and texture.