Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - George Perle, Page 7

MAGNUSSEN	But if we take the Berg example, there are gestures here that are very strong. They're about forward motion, they're about timbre, they're about rhythm – and I'm wondering, when you put your composer “hat” on and you're sitting in front of a blank page, are your musical gestures a result of first figuring out which pitches you want to deal with, or which harmonic world you would like to begin with, and then finding the gesture? Or does the gesture come first? I mean, your music seems to me very much about gesture, and about sound…
PERLE	This is a realm where I find it difficult to explain things, when you ask me about my own music. My own work is strongly intuitive. I had a striking experience with one of my pieces. I was bringing a section to a close and I knew the notes that I wanted at this point, and no matter how I put them down, I didn't like them. I didn't ask myself why. It's very difficult – you would never finish a piece if you stopped every time something was ambiguous, so you couldn't just take it for granted that it was right. (Which doesn't mean that I don't want to know what I'm doing – I do – but the composing process happens much more quickly than the analytical process.) Anyway, I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working, so since it was about two o'clock in the morning anyway, I went to bed. When I woke up, I went back to the piano and I got it right immediately. I said to myself, “I've had so much trouble with this passage, I'm going to find out what happens when I compose, and I'm not going to move onto the next note until I know why what I did last night wasn't working.” And I discovered – this sounds a little weird – that there was a reference to a symmetrical relation (I don't know whether it was part of the same whole tone [series], or what) but in the distribution of the notes as I worked them out in the morning, there were symmetrical relationships to intervals that were not basic to what I was doing, they were not part of my scale – I was thinking of something else. But there were incidental connections that the discovery of which was educational to me as a composer. I was ready to look at other things. It did something to my approach. I guess I'm telling you this because I want to emphasize the extent to which the intuitive is important in composition.
BORISKIN	A number of people have spoken about you being one of the great “late bloomers” creatively in 20th century music. Even though you have obviously been composing all of your professional life, it's kind of undeniable that your strongest and most compelling and most attractive work has come over the last 30 years or so, and I'm wondering if you have any sense as to what that could be attributed to?
PERLE	Well, I don't know that that's actually true.
BORISKIN	I mean, I have followed your work pretty closely and I've had the pleasure of working with you on a number of pieces and premiering and recording a number of things, and it's like some of the great composers of the past – starting from around 1970, almost every work that George publishes has enormous value and appeal and substance and it's just terribly complete and wonderful. Do you feel that we have to go back and look at all kinds of older works that we don't know as well? Are we missing something? Or did something change, did something come across your work and your approach to composing that is maybe responsible for the perception? Or is it a misperception?
PERLE	I wish somebody else would answer this question. (laughter)
MAGNUSSEN	Well, you began your work in the late 1930s, and then, I think, in 1969 you and Paul began working together. Wasn't there also a period of time somewhere in there, where you decided not to show a few of your works to the public?
LANSKY	I should say something. When George and I started collaborating, it was very interesting because our responses to the stuff we were doing was quite opposite. I got bogged down in all kinds of details and he just wrote piece after piece, and it was really inspiring. (to George) Your response to something we would come up with would be to write a piece, and my response would be to go to a mathbook or something. So I think there was a real growth in you. (I mean, your works before you started to do that stuff were great, too – the wind quintets, the serenade, so it's not as if…)
BORISKIN	…No, I didn't mean to suggest that either – I mean I've recorded some works pre-1970 and (before) the time he worked with you. I somehow remember either reading about or your telling me about your feeling a greater assimilation with this language that you were sort of conceiving, and a kind of greater universality in its application that may have resulted in a kind of quantum leap in your later work as compared to your earlier work. I'm not trying to denigrate your earlier stuff because there is wonderfully energetic and dynamic work among the earlier things.
PERLE	Well, I should take this opportunity to do something for myself. I published a book in 1962 called Serial Composition and Atonality. Nobody wanted to publish it but when somebody finally took it on, it sold out instantly, as I figured would happen because I knew there was a need and a demand for a book like that. But the title of the book was unfortunate, or the subtitle: Serial Composition and Atonality: an Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern – period. Well, apparently everybody read it as “An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern and Perle.” Everybody just assumed this and so I suddenly became a twelve-tone composer. Now I had thought about being a twelve-tone composer simply because I was looking for something and I recognized from the Lyric Suite that there was nobody around to help me, to explain this funny music which had a sharp or a flat or a natural in front of every single note. I was with my then composition teacher in Wisconsin at the Frank Lloyd Wright Estate, when I (first) saw the score for the Lyric Suite . This was a period where I was very discouraged about composing. I had always wanted to be a composer. In fact, I always thought I was a composer – to tell the truth. And I needed to look at some other music. I felt, in my own small way, I was really repeating the experience that Schoenberg had some decades earlier. I opened the score of the Lyric Suite and my life changed instantaneously. I took it to the piano and immediately saw the structure of the twelve-tone row that governs the first movement and analyzed the four notes that we found out later were the initials of Alban Berg and Hannah Fuchs. I knew nothing about Schoenberg – I was just discovering what the open pages told me. And the next day I told my teacher how excited I was. (This is kind of a private story but I will tell it to you anyway.) I tried to talk to my teacher about it the next day and he was profoundly embarrassed. I never mentioned it to him again, and I went on to invent a better twelve-tone system than Schoenberg's. In my twelve-tone system, we had the prime, which gave you the neighbor notes of any one note in the series. You had another form that was the inversion of this, and you could go in either direction. In other words, the four directions in which you can place tone are all present here – and I had misinterpreted it. I thought what you had around each note were the neighbor notes that give you a reference to that note. I didn't look at it as four different things. And then, a couple of years later, I was composing all the time with what I supposed was twelve-tone, even though I couldn't find any confirmation for what I was doing in Berg's piece. But Berg's twelve-tone music departs from what the conventional definition of twelve-tone music was just as radically and much more freely than I did. Then I had a lesson with (Ernst) Krenek. These new immigrants that we had in this country were nice to have around – to be able to talk to them. Krenek didn't know what I was talking about at first. Then he realized what I was doing, giving each notes all the structural relationships that are implied by it and those adjacent to it, and he said, “You haven't made a mistake, you've made a discovery.” Which I thought was a remarkable statement coming from (him).
MAGNUSSEN	When was this lesson with Krenek? Was this in the late 1930s?
PERLE	It was in 1937 that I started monkeying around with the twelve-tone system. I came up with my own version of it in 1930 but by 1939 I had come up with this axis–neighbor note thing. And I had also come up with the notion that one had to do something radical here with the tone material and that the Schoenbergian tone row, which is a twelve-tone “tune” or something, wasn't going to work for me. And I hit on the idea of using the cycle of fifths and combining the inversion and the prime so you had these fixed four-note (arrays). And I saw that it made a better twelve-tone system than the Schoenbergian tone row. But anyway, this is getting too abstract probably. I've resented people calling me a twelve-tone composer, but only because that's a generic term that doesn't mean anything anymore at all – nothing. Do you want to add to that, Paul?
LANSKY	No, it's okay, you're doing fine. (laughter)