Perle, G :: Wind Quintet No. 4

This edition of George Perle's 'Wind Quintet No. 4' is the score only with the individual parts sold separately.

One danger with isms, Theodore Adorno wrote in his Aesthetic Theory , is that, initially, artists who follow the ism less religiously tend to be underrated in favor of those whose allegiance is more dramatic. Few composers better exemplify that phenomenon than George Perle, who for much of his career has stood in the shadow of the serialist composers with whom he is dubiously associated. Only gradually has the music world come to realize how individual his music is, what a flexible musical language he has developed, and how different that language is from serialism. Thus the 1986 Pulitzer Prize Perle received for one of the works on this record, the Wind Quintet No. 4 , seemed not so much an award for an isolated achievement as an overdue tribute to someone who has upheld the highest musical standards for over a quarter-century. For the record, the Fourth Quintet (1984) is the only one written strictly in Perle's system, though the system informs all of his writing, and the ear is hard put to tell the difference. The piece abandons the strictures of metric modulation for a freer conception of tempo with frequent ritards and accelerandos. Like so many late works of important composers, this quintet possesses a greater smoothness and cohesiveness of language than the earlier ones, for which some of the style's more picturesque idiosyncrasies have been sacrificed (one thinks of the late Beethoven sonatas, or Wagner's counterpoint in Parsifal). The work's most fascinating feature is possibly the a-rhythmically contrapuntal texture of the Scherzo (forever interrupted by the rabble-rousing horn), unique in the genre's literature. Symmetry on every level is an increasingly important aspect of Perle's late music, and the finale quotes heavily from the opening movement.

- Kyle Gann