Red Love Across the Pacific: Political and Sexual Revolutions of the Twentieth Century by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781137507044
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

George Perle: The Serialist

The political radicalization of George Perle, the major theorist of serialism (the method of composition associated with Schoenberg’s 12-tone technique), was more conventional. Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, of a Jewish immigrant family that was cultured but financially insecure, Perle lived in Chicago until the mid-1920s and then on farmland in northern Indiana. Perle’s genius for music was apparent at age six or seven when he sat down at a piano obtained for his sister. The composition he played by Chopin made sense to him and he knew that he wanted to compose. Soon, he was commuting to Chicago for music lessons.

Perle attended DePaul University at the height of the Great Depression and was radicalized by the time he received his degree in 1938. He next moved toward Trotskyism while obtaining a Masters of Music at the American Conservatory of Music. He joined the Chicago branch of the SWP in 1942, the same year that he finished the degree. Still known as Perlstein, he was tall, wiry, and slender, a darkly handsome man with broad shoulders, high cheekbones, and an ascetic aura.48

The stages of Perle’s musical development link to political moments in the late 1930s and after, although it would be simpleminded to claim that a growing attraction to Marxism and Trotskyism explains his art. In 1937, following a period of pessimism and disorientation, Perle initially connected with what he called “the revolutionary direction in twentieth century music represented by the Viennese,” and in 1938, he wrote his first atonal piece.49 After 1939, with the onset of the war in Europe, he took his first lesson with refugee composer Ernst Krenek (1900–1991) and realized that he was developing a consistent theory of diatonic music.

In August 1940, the same month Trotsky was assassinated, Perle wrote three important piano pieces using the 12-tone modal system, a groundbreaking departure from the diatonic scale. In 1941, on the cusp of joining the Trotskyists, he published his first scholarly essay on the theory of atonality. Three years later, in his political writing for the SWP, he explained that his understanding of musical tones was originally made visible through the Marxist dialectic, although this claim did not appear in his academic publications (which he cited as evidence for his political argument).50

Between August 1943 and February 1946, Perle served in the army, mostly overseas in Europe, the Philippines, and Japan. Relocating to New York City with his wife, Laura Slobe, he used the G. I. Bill to start doctoral work at New York University in Medieval and Renaissance music. In the New York branch of the SWP, he was an activist who also participated in arranging fund raising, sometimes by playing concerts with violinist Seymour Barab (b. 1921), and where he wrote under the name Sanders for the Fourth International.51 Like Schoenberg, who arranged singing groups of workers, Perle established a chorus of SWP members in New York, people with no particular musical education. After rehearsing and then performing traditional radical songs, such as “Drill, Ye Tarriers, Drill” (1888), Perle arranged to cut a record for use at party functions.

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