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.”

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