Ronald Perera’s compositions include song cycles, theater, chamber, choral and orchestral works, and several works for instruments or voices with electronic sounds. He is perhaps best known for his settings of texts by authors as diverse as Dickinson, Joyce, Grass, Sappho, Cummings, Shakespeare, Francis of Assisi, Melville and Ferlinghetti. His 1989 opera The Yellow Wallpaper received its New York premiere in December 1992 at the Manhattan School of Music.

Ronald Perera

He composed Earthsongs for women’s chorus and orchestra in 1983 for the Smith College Glee Club. This is the 4th movement of 6.

E.E. Cummings’ rousing poem about hunting, complete with bows, arrows, hunting horns, and deer builds on traditional mythic imagery and a traditional balladic structure, told from the perspective of a speaker. The combination of imagistic language, alliterative word choice, and repetition builds to create a poem with surprising metaphoric language for love as a grand chase. Cummings manages to craft a playful, inventive, extended metaphor that makes even the most devastating of hits from Cupid’s arrow sound like an adventure in an Arthurian legend. At its center, it is a poem about falling in love, the “hunt” for love culminating in the “arrow” striking the heart of the speaker!