The Listening Composer (Ernest Bloch Lectures in Music)

Rating:
Summary: Musical modernism made easy
Review: 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.