George Perle

“Every bit of theorizing I’ve ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing.”

“If...[Alban] Berg departs so radically from tradition, through his substitution of a symmetrical partitioning of the octave for the asymmetrical partitionings of the major/minor system, he departs just as radically from the twelve-tone tradition that is represented in the music of Schoenberg and Webern, for whom the twelve-tone series was always an integral structure that could be transposed only as a unit, and for whom twelve-tone music always implied a constant and equivalent circulation of the totality of pitch classes.”

“This intersecting of inherently non-symmetrical diatonic elements with inherently non-diatonic symmetrical elements seems to me the defining principle of the musical language of Le Sacre and the source of the unparalleled tension and conflicted energy of the work.”

“Z-relation, or rather, "that certain pitch-class collections share the same 'interval vector' even though they are neither transpositionally nor inversionally equivalent was first pointed out by Howard Hanson in Harmonic Materials of Modern Music (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960), p. 22, and by David Lewin in "Re: The Intervallic Content of a Collection of Notes," Journal of Music Theory 4:1 (1960). For a general criticism of Forte's concepts of pitch-class set equivalence see Perle, "Pitch-Class Set Analysis: An Evaluation," Journal of Musicology 8:2 (1990).”

“I would not want you to suppose that my rejection of Allen Forte's theory of pitch-class sets implies a rejection of the notion that there can be such a thing as a pitch-class set. It is only when one defines everything in terms of pitch-class sets that the concept becomes meaningless.”

“His partitioning of the octave in the first ten bars places Varèse with Scriabin and the Schoenberg circle among the revolutionary composers whose work initiates the beginning of a new mainstream tradition in the music of our century.”