George Perle's Six New Etudes: Symmetry, audibility, and the rhetoric of reconciliation.

Abstract

George Perle's system of musical composition, which he enigmatically terms twelve-tone tonality, first arose as a youthful misunderstanding of Schoenberg's theory---access to which was severely limited in the 1930s---and evolved over several decades into an elaborate and self-contained network of pitch-class relationships, cast ostensibly in the image of traditional tonality but in fact hewn from interval cycles, inversion, and symmetry on multiple levels. The objective of this study is to provide a working understanding of twelve-tone tonality and examine the strategies by which Perle rhetorically bridges the gap between tonality and atonality, both in his writings and in the works themselves. Some readily audible relationships that emerge from Perle's language are demonstrated in an analysis of the <italic>Six New Etudes</italic> (1984), and particular emphasis is placed on the question of compositional choice as it intersects with more systematic aspects of the music. Rather than focusing exclusively on the theoretical mechanisms of the <italic> Etudes</italic>, this paper aims to use analysis as a means to consider the aesthetic consequences of Perle's compositional method. Chapter 1 is a critique of the philosophy of Perle's twelve-tone tonality and the underlying narrative of reconciliation implied by the term. Perle's compositional and scholarly rhetoric is considered alongside that of other major figures in twentieth-century music. Chapter 2 attempts to explain essential points of Perle's theory in an accessible way; it is intended to be a practical guide rather than a comprehensive treatise. Chapter 3 uses excerpts from the <italic> Six New Etudes</italic> to derive methods of identifying pitch arrays, retracing some of the steps of my own analytical process. Chapter 4 explores the phrase structure and array content of each of the six etudes in detail.