George Perle, 93; composer, theorist won Pulitzer Prize

George Perle composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, and voice. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. (Sara Krulwich/New York Times/File 1999)

NEW YORK - George Perle, a composer, author, theorist, and teacher who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986 and was widely considered the poetic voice of atonal composition, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

His wife, Shirley, said he died after a long illness.

Dr. Perle composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, and voice. An early admirer of the Second Viennese School - the group of composers led by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg - he wrote many articles and books on its members' 12-tone and Serial methods of atonal composition. But though he used aspects of those methods in his own composing, he never adopted them fully.

Instead he developed an approach he called "12-tone tonality," a seemingly contradictory term that suggested a middle path between those who rejected conventional tonality and those who considered atonality an unproductive break with the past.

Like the Serialists, Dr. Perle argued that if the 12 notes of the chromatic scale were treated equally, they would yield greater expressive possibilities than the seven-note major and minor scales that had dominated Western harmony for centuries. The difference between Dr. Perle's method and strict Serialism, though, was that he did not insist on predetermined and rigorously ordered tone rows (or note sequences). He was equally free in his use of rhythms and dynamics.

His themes could be angular and his harmony acidic, yet there was an inherent lyricism in his music that made it accessible and at times almost neo-Romantic. The best of his works - Serenade No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra (1983), Six Etudes for Piano (1973-76), Wind Quintet No. 4 (1985), and "Critical Moments 2" (2001) - were striking not only for their elegance and ingenuity, but also for the current of dry wit that revealed a vital and engaging musical personality. And many of them, particularly those composed after the mid-1980s, had an affecting, nostalgic undercurrent.

Some works, like Partita for Solo Violin (1965) and "Songs of Praise and Lamentation" (1975), revealed the depth of Dr. Perle's feeling for the classical tradition that he believed he was extending. The Partita, though clearly in a modern style, carried allusions to Bach's solo violin works. And the "Songs of Praise and Lamentation," composed in memory of Noah Greenberg, the early-music specialist, included elements of Hebrew psalm cantillation, Gregorian chant, and quotations from funereal works by Josquin, Binchois, and Ockeghem, three Renaissance composers whose works were associated with Greenberg.

Dr. Perle was finicky about his own music. The list of his compositions in the New Grove Dictionary of American Music includes numerous works marked "withdrawn," including his Symphony No. 3 and his String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 6. Mostly, these were works composed before 1970, when Dr. Perle arrived at what he considered a workable approach to his 12-tone tonality. But into the '90s, critics who attended dress rehearsals of Dr. Perle's works - the open rehearsals at Tanglewood, for example - could find him penciling small changes into a score.

George Perle was born in Bayonne, N.J., and grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Indiana. He vividly recalled his first musical experience, an encounter with Chopin's Etude in F minor, played by an aunt.

"It literally paralyzed me," he said in an interview in 1985. "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."