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The Listening Composer (Ernest Bloch Lectures)

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As Perle himself explains, these lectures (separated into chapters here) were originally addressed to varying audiences. Some are easily understandable by the layman; others require technical knowledge of music theory. Some are deeply stimulating, and others are just fun, but all are well-worth reading. I find "The Martian Musicologists" especially amusing. Here Perle excoriates the dubious "set theory" of Allen Forte. The title of this lecture derives from an equally severe (and deservedly so) critique of Allen Forte's "method" by the brilliant musicologist Richard Taruskin.

This book is a collection (or, more likely, rewriting) of six lectures originally given to a live audience. You can sum down the basis of it's content to two statements:

1. The so-called "post-tonal" composers of the early 20th Century (Bartok, Berg, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Varese and Webern are the ones treated in any detail), for all their differences, share a common stylistic trait in their reliance of background structures made up of symmetrical constellations, primarily the tritone, the augmented third chord, the diminished seventh chord and the whoe-tone scale. These structures invade late tonal music as a disturbing feature (examples from Mahler and Liszt is shown), eventually replacing tonality as the underlying framework against which the compositions must be intellectually understood.

2. The Pitch Class Analysis method championed by Allen Forte is claimed to be entirely insufficient (as it has been employed traditionally; Perle is explicit in that he doesn't deny it's potential power) due to it's lack of a method to reveal underlying structures as opposed to contrapuntal elaborations and harmonic detours (the terms harmony and counterpoint are, of course, used in the widest possible meaning of the terms).

If this sounds interesting, "The Listening Composer" is probably for you. I do, however, have to warn any potential readers that this is not an easy read. The six lectures are supposed, one figures, to be on different topics, but analyses of different parts of one piece can be given in different chapters, with different foci to boot; Perle expects his reader to be able to follow him through sudden changes of focus through rather long stretches of text, and then to pick up the thread left behind when the time is right. To be sure, all discourse demands this to a certain extent, but I found this book particularly hard to comprehend. For the more advanced chapter I had to make notes of the chief points, something I've never HAD to do to follow the discourse of a book before. One can imagine that many of these points would have been easier to follow in the original live setting, and while there are indeed thoughts so profound that a dense style is required, but looking over my notes I can't help but think that the material could have been presented in an easier style by dropping the lecture chapterisation and reconsider the sequence of thoughts in the book; I am sure it could have been converted to a (admittedly very long) article in itself. We would of course have missed out on a lot of details and interesting anecdotes from Perle.

The cause may be that I am underread on 20th Century musicology texts. In any case, despite my critiques towards Perle's prose style I have become interested enough to plan to buy his other books, and, for the reader interested in the peculiarities of early 20th Century avant-garde music, I cannot do anything but recommend this book heartily.

In his Bloch Lectures Perle argues that there is indeed a "new common practice" and that is is the "shared premise of the harmonic equivalence of inversionally symmetrical pitch-class relations," among composers such as Varese, Berg, Bartok, Schoenberg, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Webern, and himself.

He illustrates this tradition and its continuity with the common practice period through examples, such as Varese's Density 21.5 and Beethoven, which are analysed insightfully. Along the way he deals with some aesthetic and other issues. Great ideas for analysis or composition.