Julia Perry’s outstanding works experimented with dissonance and modern compositional expressions. In 1965, The New York Philharmonic performed her “Short Piece for Orchestra”—the first-ever composition by a Black woman, and the third by any woman, in the symphony orchestra’s performance history. Perry’s works, a culmination of neo-classical technique and Black and African spiritual music, are musical testaments to her explorations of heritage and contemporary mythology, as in her three-act opera The Symplegades, based on the Salem witchcraft trials, and an operatic ballet based on Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant.