George
Perle
(born
May 6,
1915 in
Bayonne, New Jersey) is
a
composer and
musicologist who has
studied with
Ernst Krenek. He
composes with a technique of
his own devising called
twelve-tone tonality, which
is very different from the
twelve tone technique
(Perle, 1992). Former
student
Paul Lansky describes:
"Basically this creates a
hierarchy among the notes of
the chromatic scale so that
they are all referentially
related to one or two
pitches which then function
as a tonic note or chord in
tonality. The system
similarly creates a
hierarchy among intervals
and finally among larger
collections of notes,
'chords.' The main debt of
this system to the 12-tone
system lies in its use of an
ordered linear succession in
the same way that a 12-tone
set does." (Chase 1992,
p.587)
He was cofounder, in 1968, of the Alban Berg Society with Igor Stravinsky and, in 1986, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize for his Fourth Wind Quintet.
Partial bibliography
- Perle, George (1992). Symmetry, the Twelve-Tone Scale, and Tonality. Contemporary Music Review 6 (2), pp. 81-96
- Perle, George (1962, reprint 1991). Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. University of California Press. ISBN 0520074300
- Perle, George (1978, reprint 1992). Twelve-Tone Tonality. University of California Press. ISBN 0520201426.
- Perle, George (1990). The Listening Composer. California: University of California Press. ISBN 0520069919.
- Perle, George (1984). Scriabin's Self-Analysis, Musical Analysis III/2 (July).
- Perle, George (1985). The Operas of Alban Berg. Vol. 2: Lulu. California: University of California Press.
Source
- Chase, Gilbert (1992). America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. University of Illinois Press, ISBN 0252062752.
External links
- Wikiquote - quotes by and about George Perle
- GeorgePerle.com A Life in Music
- ENCOUNTERS: George Perle by George Sturm
- New Music and Listener Expectation: A commencement address given at San Francisco Conservatory of Music by George Perle
- Reflections by George Perle
- Those Were The Days. Or Were They?: Three Living Legends of Contemporary Music Compare Yesterday and Today by Mic Holwin (also George Crumb and David Diamond)
- In the 1st Person : Three Generations of Teaching Music Composition Part One: George Perle and Paul Lansky - February 19, 2002 - Upper West Side, New York, NY