Perle, George (1915–2009)

George Perle (1915–2009) was an American composer and scholar, awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize (1986) for his Wind Quintet no. 4, and the Otto Kinkeldey Award (AMS) for his books on the operas of Alban Berg. Born in Bayonne, NJ, Perle discovered Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite when studying with Ernst Krenek in 1937 and went on to develop a compositional system called twelve-tone tonality from the implications of Berg’s score. Collaborative work with Paul Lansky expanded on the compositional possibilities of the system (1969) and led eventually to Perle’s mature style, exemplified by the two Piano Concerti (1990, 1992) and Transcendental Modulations for Orchestra (1993). Perle’s dual role as composer and scholar is reflected in his seventy-five compositions, ranging from solo to orchestral pieces, and seven books and numerous articles on analysis and theory issues related mostly to twentieth-century music.

Conclusion

In lectures and essays, Ligeti stressed the role of memory and historical conditioning in the conception of form and meaning in music. His sketches frequently mention music from Couperin to Mahler as a model for different features of his own. These, in turn, become the basis for expressive gestures, referencing elements of traditional music as well as familiar types from Ligeti’s own oeuvre. While it is tempting to look at the titles of works like Clocks and Clouds (after Karl Popper), San Francisco Polyphony, and Three Pieces for Two Pianos (Monument, Selbstportrait, Bewegung) as starting to build toward the expressive ends of the opera, Le Grand Macabre, this trend can actually be found in works with more abstract titles, including his String Quartet no. 2 and Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet. This historical awareness, essential to Ligeti’s music, positions him on a fine line between the modernist and postmodernist eras.

Compositional Flourishing (1967–70)

Having codified a repertoire of personalized techniques, Ligeti deployed them in many new combinations in an extremely productive period at the end of the 1960s. Works composed in this period include Continuum, Two Études for Organ, String Quartet no. 2, Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet, Ramifications, and the Chamber Concerto. This chapter looks at the contrapuntal techniques that built on the composer’s previous practice as well as those derived from harmonic networks. The latter allowed Ligeti to move away from the cluster-based harmonic palate characteristic of his earlier works. In these works Ligeti looked for diverse means of expression and presentation, and he founds ways of composing transitions between techniques, putting patterns derived from harmonic procedures into polyphonic combinations and deriving static harmonic fields from material generated as a melody.

“My” “Musical” “Language” ?

The problem associated with the musical “language” of a particular composer can be understood either literally, i.e. with some possible analogies to natural language, or metaphorically, as a substitute of style, technique, or manner. I try to combine both usages. In fact, my approach to composing music is not so much - to develop a consistent language ready for use in multiple instances and thus to attain a recognisable personal style, but rather - to try to build a tool for use in one particular composition on many levels of musical “grammar”. Another basic problem is the proportion between impulse and design as defined in a well-known book by Andrzej Panufnik. The examples discussed illustrate some core problems of the music creation process, such as the deliberately incomplete ‘‘monadic’’ form (Gamma from String Quartet No. 3); the evolution of style in the process of composition and its dependence on the medium (Rondeau for wind quintet); and purely intuitive composition (Con tenerezza from Cinque pezzi diversi).