George Perle

From Academic Kids

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.

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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.