It was more than 50 years ago that composer George Perle graduated from De Paul University, having gone there on a scholarship from an Indiana farm at the depth of the Depression. It was there that Perle first stumbled across the piano score to Alban Berg`s ”Lyric Suite” for String Quartet, an experience that would change his life.
”I took it to the dormitory piano,” Perle said, ”and within the next five minutes my whole future direction as a composer was established.
”It had seemed to me that it was no longer possible to write music that was really significant, because the traditional means of harmonic progression and structure no longer worked. While there were other ways to write music, they couldn`t provide the basis for an integrated musical language such as had been the basis of western music for some 300 years.
”Coming upon the `Lyric Suite,` I realized that such a new musical language was developing that would be as integral to the chromatic scale as the major/minor system had been to the diatonic scale.”
Ironically, Perle`s enthusiasm and imagination blinded him to the limitations of what the Viennese 12-tone composers such as Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were doing, that is, constructing ”rows” of 12 pitches in a fixed order that had to be used in sequence throughout a given piece. Perle`s conception of the process, or, as he admits, his misconception, took him in an entirely different direction from the very beginning.
”I was never interested in employing the tone-row as an easy way of deciding what the next note in a piece should be,” Perle said. ”In moving from one chord to another, I`ve been concerned with questions of voice-leading, octave displacement, presentation of motives and themes, just as any other tonal composer.”
Perle admitted that in his younger years he would have called himself a 12-tone composer, primarily because there was so little interest in even conventional 12-tone music. ”I am a 12-tone tonal composer,” he insists, ”a label that should distinguish me from the others, who are 12-tone atonal composers.
The 12-tone serial composition developed by Schoenberg has been on the wrong track all along as far as my own compositional method was concerned, and I have never been a part of that movement. In fact, my music has been as influenced by the methods of Stravinsky, Bartok, Scriabin-even Debussy-as much as any of the serialists.”
Perle`s way of approaching 12-tone music is so unique and accessible that it is still thriving, while much 12-tone music of the Viennese school has fallen by the wayside, at least as far as modern audiences are concerned.
”I think a piece of music that really makes sense will reach you at some intuitive level, even on a first hearing,” Perle said. ”I know very little about painting, but I certainly like some paintings more than others, although I would probably be at a loss to explain my preference.”
And what does Perle think of the revival of conventional tonality in recent years?
”You don`t establish continuity with the past with a collage of long quotations from tonal composers who have been dead long enough so that their music is in the public domain, or by repeating the same conventional harmonic progression 500 times,” as in the minimalist music of such composers as Philip Glass, Terry Riley or Steve Reich). ”Such approaches are parodies of tonality, not revivals of it.”
In celebration of his 75th birthday, Perle has been invited back to De Paul for a special lecture at 3 p.m. Thursday called ”The Listening Composer,” based on his book of the same name just released by the University of California Press, the publisher of such classic Perle texts as ”Serial Composition and Atonality,” ”Twelve-Tone Tonality” and his definitive two- volume study of the operas of Alban Berg.
And De Paul faculty members will give a concert of Perle`s music at 8 p.m. Friday. The concert will include his Concertino for Piano, Winds and Timpani (a Paul Fromm commission that was given its world premiere here by Ralph Shapey and the Contemporary Chamber Players in 1978), and his 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning Wind Quintet IV.
Both events are free and will be in De Paul`s Recital Hall, 804 W. Belden Ave.
