The American musician, George Perle (born 1915), was active in nearly all aspects of the field. Best known as a composer, he developed a convincing language that he called "twelve-tone tonality." He also wrote numerous articles and books and remained active as a teacher and pianist into the 1980s.

George Perle was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, on May 6, 1915. His parents had emigrated to the U.S. from Russia shortly before his birth. He spent most of his boyhood on farms in Wisconsin and Indiana. While still a high school student Perle began his formal training by taking piano and harmony lessons at the Chicago College of Music. He continued in Chicago at DePaul University from 1935 to 1938, studying composition with Wesley La Violette.

Discovery of the music of Schoenberg awakened him to new possibilities of sound organization, but it was Berg's Lyric Suite that, "like a revelation in the...