George Perle, a Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93

George Perle, a composer, author, theorist and teacher who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986 and was widely considered the poetic voice of atonal composition, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.
His wife, Shirley Perle, said he died after a long illness.
Mr. Perle composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and voice. An early admirer of the Second Viennese School — the group of composers led by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg — he wrote many articles and books on its members’ 12-tone and Serial methods of atonal composition. But though he used aspects of those methods in his own composing, he never adopted them fully.
Instead he developed an approach he called “12-tone tonality,” a seemingly contradictory term that suggested a middle path between those who rejected conventional tonality and those who considered atonality an unproductive break with the past.

Like the Serialists, Mr. Perle argued that if the 12 notes of the chromatic scale were treated equally, they would yield greater expressive possibilities than the seven-note major and minor scales that had dominated Western harmony for centuries. The difference between Mr. Perle’s method and strict Serialism, though, was that he did not insist on predetermined and rigorously ordered tone rows (or note sequences). He was equally free in his use of rhythms and dynamics.
His themes could be angular and his harmony acidic, yet there was an inherent lyricism in his music that made it accessible and at times almost neo-Romantic. The best of his works — Serenade No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra (1983), Six Études for Piano (1973-76), Wind Quintet No. 4 (1985) and “Critical Moments 2” (2001) — were striking not only for their elegance and ingenuity but also for the current of dry wit that revealed a vital and engaging musical personality. And many of them, particularly those composed after the mid-1980s, had an affecting, nostalgic undercurrent.

Some works, like Partita for Solo Violin (1965) and “Songs of Praise and Lamentation” (1975), revealed the depth of Mr. Perle’s feeling for the classical tradition that he believed he was extending. The Partita, though clearly in a modern style, carried allusions to Bach’s solo violin works. And the “Songs of Praise and Lamentation,” composed in memory of Noah Greenberg, the early-music specialist, included elements of Hebrew psalm cantillation, Gregorian chant and quotations from funereal works by Josquin, Binchois and Ockeghem, three Renaissance composers whose works were associated with Greenberg.

Mr. Perle was finicky about his own music. The list of his compositions in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music includes numerous works marked “withdrawn,” including his Symphony No. 3 and his String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 6. Mostly, these were works composed before 1970, when Mr. Perle arrived at what he considered a workable approach to his 12-tone tonality. But into the ’90s, critics who attended dress rehearsals of Mr. Perle’s works — the open rehearsals at Tanglewood, for example — could find him penciling small changes into a score.
George Perle was born in Bayonne, N.J., on May 6, 1915, and grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Indiana. He vividly recalled his first musical experience, an encounter with Chopin’s Étude in F minor, played by an aunt.

“It literally paralyzed me,” he said in an interview in 1985. “I was extraordinarily moved and acutely embarrassed at the same time, because there were other people in the room, and I could tell that nobody else was having the same sort of reaction I was.”
He began his musical studies in the early 1930s in Chicago, where his composition teacher was Wesley LaViolette. He also studied with Ernst Krenek in the early ’40s. By then, he had discovered the composers of the Second Viennese School, particularly Berg, whose 1926 “Lyric Suite” represented for Mr. Perle a way around what he saw as the limitations of conventional tonality. Berg remained an important influence on Mr. Perle, as well as one of his scholarly specialties.

Mr. Perle interrupted his studies to enter the Army as a chaplain’s assistant in World War II, serving in Europe and the Pacific. Returning to college under the G.I. Bill, he earned his doctorate at New York University in 1956. He then began a long teaching career, including positions at the University of Louisville; the University of California, Davis; Yale; Columbia; the State University of New York, Buffalo; and Queens College of the City University of New York, from which he retired in 1985. Afterward he became a professor emeritus at the college’s Aaron Copland School of Music and continued to lecture.
Mr. Perle was married three times. His first marriage, to Laura Slobe, ended in divorce; his second, in 1958, to Barbara Wharton Massey, ended with her death in 1978. He married the former Shirley Gabis Rhoads in 1982.

Besides his wife, his survivors include two daughters, Cathi Perle of Long Island, and Annette Wolter of Sacramento; two stepsons, Max Massey of Davis, Calif., and Paul Rhoads of Chinon, France; a stepdaughter, Emma Rhoads of New York City; two grandchildren; and three step-grandchildren.
For many years Mr. Perle was most widely known as a theorist and author. He published his first articles on 12-tone music in 1941 and became the most eloquent spokesman for the style. His 1962 book, “Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern,” became a classic text that was published in many translations. He set forth his own method in “Twelve-Tone Tonality” in 1977.

But his most revolutionary writing was on Berg. Considered an authority on the composer by the early ’60s, Mr. Perle was granted access to Berg’s unpublished manuscript for the opera “Lulu” in 1963. When he ascertained that the third act, long thought to be an unfinished sketch, was actually about three-fifths complete and cast an entirely new light on the opera, he protested publicly that Berg’s publisher was repressing an important part of the work. His efforts led to the completion of the third act and the presentation of the complete opera in 1979.
Mr. Perle also caused a stir in 1977, when he published “The Secret Program of the Lyric Suite” in The Newsletter of the International Alban Berg Society. Analyzing sketches and other materials, Mr. Perle discovered that the work included an extra-musical subtext in which Berg documented a love affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife of a Prague industrialist.

By the mid-1970s, performers began taking up Mr. Perle’s own music with increasing enthusiasm, and works like the Six Études for piano were hailed as important additions to the contemporary repertory. Wider recognition came in 1986, when his Wind Quintet No. 4 won the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship the same year. Mr. Perle also published “The Operas of Alban Berg” (1980 and 1985), a two-volume study regarded as a definitive analysis of “Wozzeck” and “Lulu.” He seemed not to mind that his writings on music theory, Berg and 12-tone music had overshadowed his own composition for much of his life.

“Every bit of theorizing I’ve ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer,” he told The New York Times in 1989. “I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/arts/music/24perle.html?_r=1