Today’s date 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,” he said, “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.”

Not surprisingly, Perle became a composer himself, writing for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and voice. He was also fascinated by the 20th century Austrian composers Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, and published many articles and books on their 12-tone method of composition.

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, music is both a logical and an emotional language. Perle once made this telling distinction between speech and 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 died at his home in Manhattan, aged 93, early in 2009.