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.
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About Composers Datebook®
Host John Birge presents a daily snapshot of composers past and present, with timely information, intriguing musical events and appropriate, accessible music related to each.
He has been hosting, producing and performing classical music for more than 25 years. Since 1997, he has been hosting on Minnesota Public Radio's Classical Music Service. He played French horn for the Cincinnati Symphony and Pops Orchestra and performed with them on their centennial tour of Europe in 1995. He was trained at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Eastman School of Music and Interlochen Arts Academy.
