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George Perle
 
 
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George Perle (May 6, 1915 – January 23, 2009) was a composer
Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, usually in the medium of musical notation, for interpretation and performance. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which affects issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of music....
 and music theorist
Music theory

Music theory is the field of study that deals with how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It identifies patterns that govern composer techniques....
. He was born in Bayonne, New Jersey
Bayonne, New Jersey

Bayonne is a City in Hudson County, New Jersey, New Jersey, United States, south of Jersey City. As of the United States 2000 Census, the city had a total population of 61,842....
. A student of Ernst Krenek
Ernst Krenek

Ernst Krenek was an Austrian composer. He explored atonality and other Contemporary classical music styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music ....
, Perle composed with a technique of his own devising called "twelve-tone tonality," which is different from, but related to, twelve-tone technique
Twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any through the use of tone rows....
 (Perle, 1992). Perle's former student Paul Lansky
Paul Lansky

Paul Lansky is an Electronic music or Computer music composer who has been producing works from the 1970s up to the present day ....
 described 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.






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Quotations


His partitioning of the octave in the first ten bars places Varèse with Scriabin and the Schoenberg circle among the revolutionary composers whose work initiates the beginning of a new mainstream tradition in the music of our century.

Page 12

This intersecting of inherently non-symmetrical diatonic elements with inherently non-diatonic symmetrical elements seems to me the defining principle of the musical language of Le Sacre and the source of the unparalleled tension and conflicted energy of the work.

Page 83





Encyclopedia


George Perle (May 6, 1915 – January 23, 2009) was a composer
Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, usually in the medium of musical notation, for interpretation and performance. The level of distinction between composers and other musicians varies, which affects issues such as copyright and the deference given to individual interpretations of a particular piece of music....
 and music theorist
Music theory

Music theory is the field of study that deals with how music works. It examines the language and notation of music. It identifies patterns that govern composer techniques....
. He was born in Bayonne, New Jersey
Bayonne, New Jersey

Bayonne is a City in Hudson County, New Jersey, New Jersey, United States, south of Jersey City. As of the United States 2000 Census, the city had a total population of 61,842....
. A student of Ernst Krenek
Ernst Krenek

Ernst Krenek was an Austrian composer. He explored atonality and other Contemporary classical music styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music ....
, Perle composed with a technique of his own devising called "twelve-tone tonality," which is different from, but related to, twelve-tone technique
Twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg. The technique is a means of ensuring that all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music while preventing the emphasis of any through the use of tone rows....
 (Perle, 1992). Perle's former student Paul Lansky
Paul Lansky

Paul Lansky is an Electronic music or Computer music composer who has been producing works from the 1970s up to the present day ....
 described 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
Alban Berg

Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Gustav Mahler Romantic music with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique....
 Society with Igor Stravinsky
Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer, considered by many to be the most influential composer of 20th century music. He was a quintessentially Cosmopolitanism Russian who was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people of the century....
 and Hans F. Redlich
Hans Redlich

Hans Ferdinand Redlich was an Austrian european classical music composer, Conducting, musicologist and writer....
, 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
Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize is an United States award regarded as the highest national honor in newspaper journalism, literary achievements and musical composition....
 for his Fourth Wind Quintet. He died aged 93 in New York City
New York City

The City of New York is the List of United States cities by population in the United States, while the New York metropolitan area ranks among the List of urban areas by population....
 in January 2009.

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 (1980). The Operas of Alban Berg. Vol. 1: Wozzeck. California: University of California Press.
  • 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 0-252-06275-2.


External links

  • by George Sturm
  • by George Perle
  • by George Perle
  • by Mic Holwin (also George Crumb
    George Crumb

    George Crumb is an American composer of modern and avant-garde music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres and extended technique. Examples include spoken flute and glass marbles poured onto an open piano....
     and David Diamond
    David Diamond (composer)

    David Leo Diamond was an United States composer of european classical music.He was born in Rochester, New York and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Eastman School of Music under Bernard Rogers, also receiving lessons from Roger Sessions in New York City and Nadia Boulanger in Paris....
    )
  • Part One: George Perle and Paul Lansky
    Paul Lansky

    Paul Lansky is an Electronic music or Computer music composer who has been producing works from the 1970s up to the present day ....
     - February 19, 2002 - Upper West Side, New York, NY