George Perle

Synopsis

Today’s date in 1913 marks the birthday of the American composer and musicologist George Perle, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986.

In a 1985 interview, Perle vividly recalled his first musical experience, an encounter with Chopin’s etude in F minor, played by an aunt.

“It literally paralyzed me,” said Perle. “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.”

In his own lyrical and well-crafted music, Perle employed what he called “12-tone tonality,” a middle path between rigorous atonality and traditional, tonal-based music.

Whether tonal or not, for Perle, music was both a logical and an emotional language. Perle once made this telling distinction between the English language and the language of music:

“Reading a novel is altogether different from reading a newspaper, but it’s all language. If you go to a concert, you have some kind of reaction to it. If the newspaper is Chinese, you can’t understand it. But if you hear something by a Chinese composer, if it’s playful, for instance, you understand.”

Music Played in Today's Program

George Perle (1915-2009): Serenade No. 3; Richard Goode, piano; Music Today Ensemble; Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Nonesuch 79108

On This Day

Births

• 1915 - American composer George Perle, in Bayonne, New Jersey

• 1918 - Canadian composer Godfrey Ridout, in Toronto

Deaths

• 1667 - (May 6 or 7) German composer and keyboard player Johann Jakob Froberger, 50, in Hericourt, nearr Montbeliard, France

Premieres

• 1897 - Leoncavallo: opera La Boheme in Venice

• 1981 - Rautavaara: Double-bass Concerto (Angel of Dusk), in Helsinki, with bassist Olli Kosonen and the Finnish Radio Symphony, Leif Segerstam conducting

• 1985 - Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Concerto for Trumpet and Five Players, by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble

• 1992 - Libby Larsen: Symphony No. 3 (Lyric), by the Albany Symphony (New York), Joel Revzen conducting

• 1999 - Magnus Lindberg: Cello Concerto, by the Orchestre de Paris, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and Anssi Karttunen the soloist

• 1999 - Christopher Rouse: Piano Concerto (Seeing), at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Slatkin, with Emanuel Ax on piano

Others

• 1872 - Theodore Thomas conducts the first concert of the Cincinnati Music Festival (May Festival). His program includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum, a Mozart aria, and a chorus from Haydn’s Creation.