You might say he was a Perle among American composers.
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of George Perle. Perle was born on this date in 1915 in Bayonne, NJ, though he grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Indiana.
Fascinated with music from the time he was a child (he was literally transfixed when he heard his aunt play a Chopin etude), his choice of career was pretty much a given. Perle attended DePaul University and took private lessons with Ernst Krenek. Among his own students was retired Princeton University professor Paul Lansky.
Perle fell under the spell of twelve-tone masters Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. In 1968, he cofounded the Alban Berg Society with Igor Stravinsky and Hans F. Redlich. Arguably his greatest musicological achievements were his discoveries that Berg’s “Lulu” was not in fact a sketch, but rather three quarters finished, and that Berg’s “Lyric Suite” contains a secret program related to a clandestine love affair.
His own music is influenced by the twelve-tone idiom, though it is weighted to his own purposes, with certain notes of the chromatic scale given precedence to create a kind of synthetic tonality. Perle’s Fourth Wind Quintet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986.
Maybe his music is not for everyone, but if you’re receptive, I think you’ll find it never wears out its welcome.
Happy birthday, George Perle!
Six New Etudes (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxDqR_23Puo
Adagio for Orchestra (1992): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-_PuCrsT9Q
Perle in conversation with David Dubal! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JGa7Jd5uEY
Of course, you can listen to Dubal’s “The Piano Matters” Wednesday evenings at 10 and Sundays at noon at http://www.wwfm.org.
PHOTO: Give Perle a whirl
