The Listening Composer.

George Perle is one of the best living American composers, even though he has enjoyed widespread recognition of his music for only about the last fifteen years. Yet those who have been familiar with Perle's writings on music, especially his pathbreaking studies of Alban Berg beginning in 1959, are now well into a second generation. The perverse lesson from this is that perhaps it is not beneficial for a composer of George Perle's stature to be also as good a writer as he is. Even for musicians, it is generally true that new words are easier to deal with than new notes. For that reason Perle's Serial Composition and Atonality (now in its sixth edition, its clarity, vigor, and terseness undiminished in thirty years), remains the best book we have for the purpose of, according to its subtitle, "an introduction to the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern." I …