George Perle

George Perle (born May 6, 1915 in Bayonne, New Jersey) is a composer and music theorist who has studied with Ernst Krenek. He composes with a technique of his own devising called twelve-tone tonality, which is very different from twelve tone technique (Perle, 1992). Former student Paul Lansky describes: "Basically this creates a hierarchy among the notes of the chromatic scale so that they are all referentially related to one or two pitches which then function as a tonic note or chord in tonality. The system similarly creates a hierarchy among intervals and finally among larger collections of notes, 'chords.' The main debt of this system to the 12-tone system lies in its use of an ordered linear succession in the same way that a 12-tone set does." (Chase 1992, p.587)

He was cofounder, in 1968, of the Alban Berg Society with Igor Stravinsky and, in 1986, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize for his Fourth Wind Quintet.