. Tonality: Tonality Tonality George Perle ‘Jonality Tonality ‘Tonality Tonality Tonality Twelve -tone lonality Tonality TonalityTwelve-Tone Tonality George Perle “During the 1930's Perle was among the first American composers to be at- tracted by the music and thought of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. His in- terest, however, was not so much in the 12-tone system itself as in the idea of a generalized systematic approach to dodecaphonic composition. Using some of the fundamental con- cepts of the 12-tone system, such as set and inversion, he developed an approach to composition which at- tempts to incorporate such 12-tone ideas with some of the basic kinds of hierarchical distinctions found in tonal practice, such as the concept of a ‘key’ as a primary point of reference. His ‘'12- tone modal system,’ developed contin- uously from 1939 (and in collaboration with Paul Lansky from 1969) is, in simplest terms, an attempt to create useful distinctions and differentiations in a 12-tone context by defining func- tional characteristics of pitch-class collections (‘chords’) in terms of the intervals formed by component pairs of notes, on the one hand, and the properties of these same pairs with respect to an axis of symmetry, a pointTwelve-Tone Tonality tii Wa XZD=FST1