2001
for
Flute, B-flat clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion
George Perle
Eighth Blackbird
2000 Chamber Music Competition
March 5, 2002
George Perle was an American composer and theorist whose work joined twelve-tone techniques with a strong interest in musical expression. His Woodwind Quintet No. 4 won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize. A MacArthur Fellow, he also wrote the influential book Serial Composition and Atonality.
George Perle was an American composer and theorist whose music and scholarship explored new possibilities in twelve-tone composition. Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1915, he studied composition with Wesley LaViolette at DePaul University and privately with Ernst Krenek. After military service during World War II, he pursued musicology at New York University; his doctoral dissertation became the book Serial Composition and Atonality. His compositions range from solo piano pieces and songs to chamber and orchestral works. Woodwind Quintet No. 4 received the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, and his honors also included a MacArthur Fellowship. Major commissions included Serenade III, two piano concertos, and Transcendental Modulations for the New York Philharmonic.
Of his work, George Perle wrote: "The instrumentation of these nine short, self-contained, and strikingly individual movements for six players corresponds to that of Pierrot lunaire, except for the substitution of percussion part for the quasi-spoken (Sprechstimme) vocal part of Schoenberg's work. I had taken much pleasure in the composition of a set of six such pieces in 1995-96, and was already strongly inclined to undertake such a project again when an unexpected commission from the Naumburg Foundation gave me an opportunity to do exactly that for eighth blackbird."
