George Perle

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April 20, 2008

Music

Rocketing to Inner Space, Defying Tonality

By BERNARD HOLLAND, NYT

Twelve-tone tonalist: George Perle, a dozen of whose compositions are on a new CD set, at home in Manhattan.

GEORGE PERLE, who turns 93 next month, is a rare survivor of a disappearing movement. The general public will barely notice its departure, given that not many people know it ever existed.

Mr. Perle belongs to a second generation of explorers. I doubt there will be a third. It is not a question of quality. His atonal compositions, 12 of which are collected in a two-CD retrospective on the Bridge label, are like well-cut jewelry: small enough to hold in the hand, diamond hard yet smooth to the touch, and shining with reflecting light.

I admire Mr. Perle’s music, although I can’t say I like it very much. He speaks a language he and his contemporaries made up. I can speak only the languages I was born to. Sometimes I feel guilty. Maybe I should work harder at his grammar and vocabulary. With age I feel guilty less and less.

How did all this atonality business start? A number of 20th-century composers said that it was the necessary next step, that old ways of listening had worn themselves out. It sounds reasonable to say that Anton Webern’s Piano Variations take up where Brahms left off. I admire the Webern; I even like it for its strangely satisfying space-age spirituality. I don’t think it has anything remotely to do with Brahms.

The Webern, and music that constitutes Mr. Perle’s immediate heritage, is altogether new. It is as if music history in the mid-1920s had stopped dead in its tracks and started again from scratch. Composers of the Second Viennese School — Arnold Schoenberg, Webern and, to a degree, Alban Berg — were like mutineers against the divine right of tonal music. Serialism was their Pitcairn Island. Freedom to reinvent was one result, inbreeding another.

Until the 20th century musicians obeyed natural laws of physics. Pick up a rock, drop it, and it falls to the ground. Music was the same. Send a piece of music up in the air, doctor and twist it, make it major, minor or modal; in the end it wants to come down to where it started. You can call the process tonality or music’s law of gravity.

The Nine Bagatelles for piano (played in the CD set by Horacio Gutiérrez), from 1999, and the Serenade No. 3 for piano and chamber orchestra (with Richard Goode and Gerard Schwarz conducting the Music Today Ensemble), from 1983, both have Mr. Perle’s trademark love for brief, elegant, highly energized phrases separated by marked pauses. Cleanliness and light are present: Art Deco streamlining replaces Edwardian overdecoration. If Mr. Perle is a jeweler, he is also an architect, and you can think of these pieces as buildings. We admire them for clear thinking and precision. Still, not many people want to live in them.

It is interesting that Mr. Perle’s take on 12-tone music flourished just as space travel was coming along. He and eminent colleagues like Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter were our musical astronauts. They defied gravity and left Mother Earth behind. Music soared into space. Out there in the ether a minor second would sound just as peaceful as a major third. Laws were necessary, for with everything now possible, nothing was possible.

Schoenberg escaped the chaos of limitless choice with a system whereby the appearance and frequency of certain pitches followed a rational design, one that included turning rows of notes upside down, running them back to front and the like. Mr. Perle’s music thinks in a similar way but invents its own homing devices or tonal centers.

It all sounds suspiciously like the 14th century, one of the blackest moments in human civilization and a period that produced reams of musical counterpoint surreal in its density. It may not be overly fanciful to compare the Black Death to AIDS, or the three-dimensional musical crossword puzzles of monkish scholars to the Babbitt Piano Concerto that so bewildered audiences and critics at Carnegie Hall a few years ago.

Postwar prosperity helps explain how a musical style attracted so much attention and yet was listened to by practically nobody. As academia and cultural foundations flourished, composers could write music to please themselves and one another and still make a living. Unappreciated genius and the consolations of posterity were conveniently popular conceits. American fascination with science and engineering and disgust for a tired European tradition made serial music and other rule-bound procedures a great new adventure. As with space travel, its practitioners were select and its methodology graspable by a chosen few.

Listening to recent Perle pieces like “Brief Encounters” for string quartet (the DePaul String Quartet) and the “Triptych for Solo Violin and Piano” (Curtis Macomber and Christopher Oldfather) I find admirable sophistication applied to a language I do not choose to speak. Mr. Perle has an honored place in music, but a narrow one. His pieces also raise what has become a confusing question: What do classical composers writing music like this expect from listeners?

The old simple answer was fame — the wider the better — and finally the blessings of posterity. I can’t pretend to get inside Mr. Perle’s head, and I’m sure all of us secretly yearn for greatness, but I cannot believe that he has ever seriously hoped for wide embrace.

I recently came across a television program about Mr. Carter, who, at the end, hoped that an increasingly complicated world would breed a public smart and alert enough to appreciate his music. That is a dangerous presumption, one that offers soap to an unwashed public as yet unworthy of his greatness.

Afterward I went back to George Perle on Bridge. The air seemed just as rarefied as before but somehow healthier to breathe.

[Spontooneous]

This was probably the biggest chance George Perle had to receive space in The New York Times this year (unless of course he dies). And The Times blew it by publishing this self-indulgent ramble. Yeccch.

[DTMX]

I have the Bridge recording that the article references. It's great. So is the recording of Perle's wind quintets.

Edited April 23, 2008 by DTMX

[Spontooneous]

I have the Bridge recording that the article references. Its great. So is the recording of Perle's wind quintets.

Have the wind quintets on New World and love it. Have a piano concerto on Harmonia Mundi that I don't like as much. Will put the Bridge on my list.

[Joe G]

This was probably the biggest chance George Perle had to receive space in The New York Times this year (unless of course he dies). And The Times blew it by publishing this self-indulgent ramble. Yeccch.

Lately it's been hard to tell the difference between an article written for the NY Times and an email tossed off to someone's friend.

[7/4]

George Perle, a Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93.

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[7/4]

George Perle, 1915-2009

dB