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The Listening Composer

University of California Press

Shortly after I was invited to assume the Ernest Bloch professorship I came upon an article by John Updike that made me even more uneasy than I would otherwise have been about the entailed responsibility in presenting a series of public lectures. I have never heard him but am informed, by people who have, that Mr. Updike is an excellent lecturer. Nevertheless, this is what he has to say, in the June 16, 1988, issue of the New York Review of Books , on the subject of creative writers as lecturers: "Asking a writer to lecture is like asking a knife to turn a screw. Screws are necessary to hold the world together, the tighter the better, and a screwdriver is an admirable tool, more rugged and versatile and less dangerous than a knife; but a knife with a broken tip and dulled or twisted edge serves all purposes poorly. Of course, if a knife is repeatedly used as a screwdriver, it will get worn into the shape of one; but then don't expect it to slice any more apples." I've been a college teacher for about forty years, so the role of lecturer is not unfamiliar to me, but whenever I've been called upon to address an audience on the subject of my own work as a composer I've had an uncomfortable sense of engaging in some inappropriate and awkward activity, like trying to turn a screw with a knife or to slice an apple with a screwdriver.

The subject of these lectures is of my own choosing. In what sense is that subject my own work, my own life as a composer?

A few years ago1985, the Berg centenary, to be preciseI received a phone call from the producer of a television show, inviting me to give a talk on Alban Berg. I explained that I would not be able to accept, because of conflicts due to a pending concert of my own music. "But you're not the same George Perle who composes, are you?" said the voice at the other end of the line. But I am indeed the same George Perle, and especially so in connection with these talks, an alternative title for which might have been "Tradition in 20th Century Music." But given the plethora of totally opposed compositional styles, compositional techniques, and even compositional languages today, can one speak of "Tradition in 20th Century Music," and if so, what can one mean by it? I have interpreted the above quotation from John Updike as an admonition to lay my cards on the table right away and admit that I do not present a consensual view of my subject. My words come from my own perspective as a composer, a personal perspective formed by my own need to find a way to write music that would do what music has always done, that would be coherent in the way music has always been coherent, that would be new in its language and materials only to the extent that the realization of this aim in our time demands newness in its language and materials.

My second book, published in 1977, bears the same title as an article I published thirty-four years earlier, Twelve-Tone Tonality . The title alone is enough to suggest that, in spite of our common interest in tonality, my view of tradition is not the same as that of the sponsors of a recent competition for compositions "in any style which relies partially or wholly on any major/minor key systems or modes." Neither is my perspective the same as that of an article on current trends in contemporary composition which appeared in the magazine section of the New York Times a few years ago under the title "The New

Romance with Tonality." But if the qualification of "tonality" in my title deprives me of the advantages of a shared perspective, doesn't it also suggest a similar deprivation in my relation to the tradition of twelve-tone composition?

My own romance with tonality is an old one. It predates my 1943 article by more than two decades. In fact, when I fell in love with tonality for the first time Schoenberg had not even quite arrived at his concept of an ordered statement of the twelve pitch classes as a consistent basis for atonal composition, though he was on the verge of this discovery. The first piece I can recall hearing as a coherent, integrated musical experience was the Etude in F minor from the Trois Nouvelles Etudes of Chopin. My Russian immigrant father had bought a piano in anticipation of the arrival of his niece, a pianist, from the Old Country. I was six or seven at the time. The experience of hearing her play this piece was so intense, so startling, as to induce a traumatic change of consciousness. What could I have known about "tonality"? Yet I must have "understood" this music, I must have been able to "follow" it. And what is it that we "follow" in a piece of music, what is it that gives it coherence and direction and sense, if not, in the largest sense of that term, its "tonality"?

This same cousin was my first piano teacher. It was not a happy relationship. My own identification was with the source of that music, transcendent though it seemed. I knew right away that what I had to do as a musician was compose, but my teacher seemed to be surprised by this notion. She gave me the impression that this was no longer done, that everything had already been composed by people who were now dead. She was living with us at the time, and so, to our mutual distress, she was often within earshot when I was supposed to be practicing. She could not understand why my practice sessions would be interrupted by long periods of silence, and she complained to my mother about this. I remember one of these silent

periods very well, because it was during this particular pause in my practicing that I had my second great musical experience, one that was very different from my first hearing of the Chopin etudenot at all transcendent and magical, as that had been, but equally decisive and compelling for its very difference. I noticed something remarkable about the simple, accompanied folksong I was practicing. Its two halves, each eight bars long, were exactly alike, except that the order of the two chords that concluded the first half was reversed at the conclusion of the second. I had discovered, all by myself, the difference between the half cadence and the full cadence. More than that, I had discovered the meaning of cadence in general. Most of all, I had discovered a connection between music and our normal life outside of music, for I saw an analogy between music and speech: the first half of the piece was something like a question, and the second half something like an answer. This was my first act of musical analysis and the beginning of my career as a theorist, but it was also the beginning of my career as a composer, for it was not until this moment that I saw music as something tangible, as something that could be "understood" in a different sense from the way I had "understood" the Chopin etude at that first hearing, as something that I, too, could learn to compose.

Both these ways of understanding were, of course, bound up with the traditional harmonic language of Western music. This meant that as my understanding of that language evolved, as my familiarity with its literature developed and as I labored to discover and to invent my own voice in it, I, too, found myself bound up with the ambiguities...