George Perle does not like to be called a 12-tone composer. Not because it isn't true, but because of what he believes it implies.
"It has all the wrong connotations," the 77-year-old Perle says from his home in New York, "and is partly responsible for a problem I tend to have with critics, especially those who know only my recent work."Until then, people knew my name and my books" - books with titles like "Serial Composition and Atonality: An Introduction to the Music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern" - "so they assumed George Perle must be some kind of deep thinker who writes about 12-tone music and just took it for granted that my music must sound like this 12-tone music that nobody likes.
"But it never sounded like this, not because I'm making some effort to write down to people, but because I'm writing the music I wanted to hear. And the music I wanted to hear was music based on the 12-tone scale that was a new kind of tonal music, that did the same things tonal music did, music that had harmonic direction, phrases, cadences and such - in short the things that make tonal music comprehensible."
The result is something Perle calls "12-tone tonality," a term he coined in 1939, two years after his first encounter with the score of Alban Berg's "Lyric Suite," an exposure that changed his life.
"I saw at once," he wrote later, "that it was possible to comprehend the 12 notes of the semitonal scale as an integral and autonomous structure, and I suddenly understood that I had been intuitively searching for such a possibility."
In recent years it has been enough to win him a Pulitzer Prize (in 1986, for his Fourth Wind Quintet) and commissions from the San Francisco Symphony (where from 1988 to 1991 he served as composer-in-residence), the Houston Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony and the New York Philharmonic - this in an age when 12-tone music as most people know it has been falling from favor.
Its latest product, moreover, his Piano Concerto No. 2, will be on view at this week's Utah Symphony concerts, Friday and Saturday, Feb. 5 and 6, at Abravanel Hall.
Part of a five-orchestra commission, the work is being unveiled this weekend in Columbus, Ohio, with pianist Michael Boriskin as soloist and Joseph Silverstein conducting. They will also be the soloist and conductor for this week's performances, with a recording session to follow.
(The other orchestras are the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Fairfield, Conn., Orchestra and the Richmond, Va., Symphony. Primary funding comes from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation.)
Over the years Boriskin has become something of a Perle specialist. "Actually, the first work of his I encountered was a string quartet," the pianist recalls, "and I decided I had to get to know more of this man's music."
That led to a meeting in 1978, the fruits of which included an all-Perle disc for New World Records and the American premieres of such pieces as the Six New Etudes (1984) and, after years of gathering dust on the composer's shelf, the Fantasy-Variations and Suite in C major, both from the early '70s.
"I just found him one of the most intelligent, sophisticated and engaging composers currently active," Boriskin says of his association with Perle. "So finally it was sort of a logical culmination to begin thinking about a piano concerto."
The initial inquiry, Boriskin says, came from the Fairfield Orchestra's music director, Thomas Crawford. "That was back in 1989, but it started me thinking. Having played around the country, I knew a number of conductors. So I began making phone calls and found there was significant interest in a new concerto by George for me. The result was we ended up with five orchestras to jointly premiere it. Which pleased me, because one of the main problems with new pieces is that all too often a work gets played then lies in obscurity for years because nobody wants to do the second performance."
The recording, to be made for Harmonia Mundi, will also mark the Utah Symphony's debut on that label. Plans call for it to be coupled with the "Metamorphosis" of Richard Danielpour, which Boriskin is scheduled to perform with the symphony next fall, as well as some solo material.
Compared with his First Piano Concerto, premiered two years ago in San Francisco with Richard Goode as soloist, Perle says the new piece is "very different."
"That was for a very large orchestra, in four movements, and this is for a much smaller orchestra in three. It's also funnier."
That's not a word commonly dragged into discussions of 12-tone music, but it's certainly appropriate in talking about the wit and energy one hears in the First Concerto.
"I think those are good expressions to describe this piece as well," observes Silverstein. "It's really kind of a lacy piece, very fast but with textures that are very fine, and very transparent. It also appears to be very challenging for the piano."
"It is very difficult," Boriskin affirms, "and we all have to be on our toes because almost everything happens at breakneck speed. But I think it's one of the best things he's done, a real dazzler."
A lot of people seem to think Perle is doing his best work right now, and he wouldn't disagree. But part of that perception, he believes, relates to his problem with the critics.
"You see, they've been hearing my music and they like it, and don't find it inaccessible or dry and so on. So they've invented a fiction, it being that the reason I've had certain successes as a composer in recent years is that there's been a drastic change in my sound and that I'm writing a new kind of music. But I haven't changed my philosophy as a composer. I knew what I wanted to do back in 1939 and just followed that direction and developed."
What's more, he confesses, that development is still going on. "In fact, it's evolving in every piece. I wish it would stop already - it just seems to be exploding. But it's all part of the same thing."
Why, then, does he think he's getting so many more performances these days?
"I don't know. But it's true, and it started before I got the Pulitzer. I once asked Gunther Schuller, a very dear friend, what he thought and he said, `Look, you're in your 70s and you've been around such a long time that it just happened.' But I do know that what I'm writing now comes the closest to my idea of a really integrated musical language, a language people have worked on since Berg, Stravinsky and Bartok. Bartok's Fourth and Fifth String Quartets, for example, come as close to the concept of 12-tone tonality as anything."
This week's concerts will couple the Perle concerto with music of Beethoven, his "Coriolan" Overture, and Dvorak, the Symphony No. 7 in D minor. Starting time is 8 p.m. with tickets priced from $10 to $30 ($5 students).
For information call 533-NOTE.