Anthony Rice-Perttunen's Mt. Mather Base Camp
Greetings, peace, thank you for stopping by to visit!
Come, make yourself at home (I know, it’s a little windy here, but the view is great). This is a special place for me, a perch overlooking the lower Muldrow Glacier in Denali National Park, in Alaska. There’s good medicine up here.
No, we definitely don’t have any mountains where I live in Oulu, Finland. But it’s a good land here in Oulu, just the same. We’re fortunate to have good water, clean air and – most importantly, we’re surrounded by courteous human beings. Gardening can be a bit more challenging with the long winters.
I’d offer you something to eat or drink, but I’m afraid web technology hasn’t kept pace with Mohawk custom. Please accept my apologies. You see, I sit with the 
Clan in the Mohawk Trail Longhouse. I’m descended from the Kaniekehaken (“People of the Flint”, or “Mohawk”), of the Hotinosionni (“People of the Longhouse”, or “Iroquois”) Confederacy. That’s me in the black and white picture at right, albeit 35 years ago. I do my best to keep my cultural identity strong in my life. Every once in a great while, you’ll find me where my grandfather was born and raised: Kahnawake Reserve outside of Montreal or, rarer still, visiting Alaska, where I was born.
Me and Music?
Yes, I’m also a composer, singer/songwriter, arranger and recording producer. I’ve composed in a wide variety of styles and idioms from bluegrass to avantgarde, for orchestras and sequenced synthesizers. At left is a picture of me from 24 years ago holding one of my more precious instruments.
I’ve played for 54 years (self-taught the first 9). I began study at U. Alaska, Fairbanks in 1979, then began three years of study at Aspen’s Summer Music festival.
In 1982, I transferred to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, eventually studying composition and orchestration, first under Jan Krzywicki and Andrew Rudin, then with Frederick Kaufman. At the same time, U. Arts was becoming rife with collaborative opportunities blending dance, music, theatre, film and visual art. I participated in, then began producing a multitude of collaborations that ultimately made me even more passionate about making multimedia.
In subsequent years I wrote (music and plays), arranged, recorded and produced for friends’ albums, conducted chamber and church ensembles, performed a dizzying variety of music styles, produced dramatic works commissioned for theater productions, dance companies, for film and video, choral and instrumental ensembles in major cities in California, Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania and Alaska. I got to session and even gig on a couple of occasions with some of Philly’s and NYC’s finest. The photo at right is from 1994. A 13 year sabbatical followed, during which I grew up, released a few counter-productive stories, got married, moved to New York, worked at IBM, lost a sister to cancer, got divorced, landing in New Mexico. I wondered whether I could recover my passion for making music for music’s sake.
FINLAND?
By 2007 I’d begun tinkering again with recording even traveling to Philly to record two jazz originals (For My Father and Feelings of Missing You) at Widener University’s studio. None other than Philly’s brilliant Tom Lawton was on piano, the world-beloved Larry McKenna on tenor, Dan Monaghan on drums, Paul Gehman on upright and Andy Wilson on chromatic harmonica. Sadly, both tunes remain languishing in post-pro. However, I’d met my future wife and decided to move to Finland.
By the time I moved in 2008, the growing European economic malaise had scuttled gig opportunities. Nevertheless, Oulu’s Uuden Musiikin Lokakuu Festival did enable the European premiere of my song cycle, Leaves, with its recording airing on Finland’s YLE 1 national radio.
I’m still here, composing anew. If you’re curious about my style, check out my bio page.
Me and Alaska?
Well, my connection with Alaska is a sort of biographical story – a kind of ‘work in progress’. If you’d rather avoid this (rather droll, in my opinion) history of my childhood, why not scoot over to a taste of Denali? Enjoy…..and thank you for honoring me with your patience reading this far, letting me share these parts of myself with you!