Quotes by George Perle

His partitioning of the octave in the first ten bars places Varese 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.

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.

Reading a novel is altogether different from reading a newspaper, but it's all language. If you go to a concert, you have some kind of reaction to it. If the newspaper is Chinese, you can't understand it. But if you hear something by a Chinese composer, if it's playful, for instance, you understand.