Composers Datebook

Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.

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George Perle


Synopsis

Today’s date in 1913 marks the birthday of the American composer and musicologist George Perle, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986.

In a 1985 interview, Perle vividly recalled his first musical experience, an encounter with Chopin’s Étude in F minor, played by an aunt. “It literally paralyzed me,” said Perle, “I was extraordinarily moved and acutely embarrassed at the same time, because there were other people in the room, and I could tell that nobody else was having the same sort of reaction I was.”

In his own lyrical and well-crafted music, Perle employed what he called “12-tone tonality,” a middle path between rigorous atonality and traditional, tonal-based music.

Whether tonal or not, for Perle music was both a logical and an emotional language. Perle once made this telling distinction between the English language and the language of music:

“Reading a novel is altogether different from reading a newspaper, but it's all language. If you go to a concert, you have some kind of reaction to it. If the newspaper is Chinese, you can't understand it. But if you hear something by a Chinese composer, if it's playful, for instance, you understand.”

Music Played in Today's Program

George Perle (1915 - 2009) Serenade No. 3 for Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1983) Richard Goode, p; Music Today Ensemble; Gerard Schwarz, cond. Nonesuch 79108

On This Day Births
  • 1915 - American composer George Perle, in Bayonne, N.J.;

  • 1918 - Canadian composer Godfrey Ridout, in Toronto;

Deaths
  • 1667 - (on May 6 or 7) German composer and keyboard player Johann Jakob Froberger, age 50, in Hericourt, nearr Montbeliard , France;

Premieres
  • 1897 - Leoncavallo: opera "La Boheme" in Venice;

  • 1981 - Rautavaara: Double-bass Concerto ("Angel of Dusk"),in Helsinki, with bassist Olli Kosonen and the Finnish Radio Symphony, Leif Segerstam conducting;

  • 1985 - Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: "Concerto for Trumpet and Five Players," by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble;

  • 1992 - Libby Larsen: Symphony No. 3 ("Lyric"), by the Albany Symphony (NY), Joel Revzen conducting;

  • 1999 - Magnus Lindberg: Cello Concerto, by the Orchestre de Paris, with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting and Anssi Karttunen the soloist;

  • 1999 - Christopher Rouse: "Seeing" (Piano Concerto), at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Slatkin, with Emanuel Ax the soloist;

Others
  • 1872 - Theodore Thomas conducts the first concert of the Cincinnati Music Festival ("May Festival"); His program includes Beethoven's Fifth, Handel's "Dettingen Te Deum," a Mozart aria, and a chorus from Haydn's "Creation."

Links and Resources


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 May 6, 2021  2m