George Perle

George Perle (May 6, 1915 - January 23, 2009) was a composer and music theorist. He was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. A student of Ernst Krenek, Perle composed 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 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 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. He died aged 93 in New York City in January 2009.

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