George Perle

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George Perle
Born	May 6 1915 (1915-05-06) (age 94)
Origin	Bayonne, New Jersey Image:Flag of the United States.svg
Occupation(s)	Composer

George Perle (born May 6, 1915 in Bayonne, New Jersey) is a composer and music theorist who has studied with Ernst Krenek. He composes with a technique of his own devising called twelve-tone tonality, which is different from, but related to, twelve tone technique (Perle, 1992). 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)

He was cofounder, in 1968, of the Alban Berg Society with Igor Stravinsky and, Hans F. Redlich who gave the idea (according to George Perle himself in his letter of the 4/1/89 to Glen Flax). In 1986, George 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.