George Perle

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George Perle
Background information
Born May 6, 1915 (1915-05-06) (age 93)
Origin Bayonne, New Jersey Flag of the United States
Occupation(s) Composer

George Perle (born May 6, 1915 in Bayonne, New Jersey) is a composer and music theorist. A student of Ernst Krenek, Perle composes with a technique of his own devising called "twelve-tone tonality," which is different from, but related to, twelve-tone technique (Perle, 1992). Perle's former student Paul Lansky describes it thus: "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).

In 1968 Perle cofounded the Alban Berg Society with Igor Stravinsky and Hans F. Redlich, who had the idea (according to Perle in his letter to Glen Flax of 4/1/89). In 1986 Perle was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize for his Fourth Wind Quintet.

[edit] 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.
  • Perle, George (1978, reprint 1992). Twelve-Tone Tonality. University of California Press.
  • Perle, George (1990). The Listening Composer. California: University of California Press. .
  • 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.

[edit] Source

  • Chase, Gilbert (1992). America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. University of Illinois Press, ISBN 0-252-06275-2.

[edit] External links

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