Lessons with George Perle

It was a bright warm fall morning in September 1961 when I arrived for my freshman music theory class at Queens College. I had never heard of my instructor, George Perle, a youngish looking fellow I assumed was fresh from graduate school. With typical 17-year old audacity I asked him where he had studied he mumbled something about being out of school for a while. I would never have suspected that he was as ancient as 46, but then again, what do 17-year-olds know about such things. When my close friend Joshua Rifkin heard his name he told me that Perle had written an important article on Busnois and was also a well-known composer. I was impressed. Needless to say, the next five years at Queens were an exhilarating ride, with George Perle at the center of my world there. I studied with him during most semesters harmony, ear-training, composition, honors studies in contemporary music and in my final semester he ruined my perfect music GPA by giving me an Ain a graduate composition class. My need to please George was intense. With his absolute pitch, excellent keyboard abilities and voluminous knowledge of the literature he seemed to me to be the paragon of musical virtue. I still remember with horror my freshman keyboard harmony exam when I kept stumbling over various transpositions oi Drink to Me Only . . . George (Dr. Perle at that point) said I played like someone with a bad stutter. I resolved to remedy this and after a year of piano lessons with Charles Burkhardt, I proudly played the Chopin F minor opus-posthumous etude for George. It turns out that this piece was very important to him, having played a central role in his early musical life. Whew! Our theory class was small, there were only about five or six of us. Marvin Hamlisch joined us in the second year, and George had Paul Simon in another class, alas. (Carole King was a student there at about this time and knowing George's love of Beethoven I often wonder whether he had a hand in the resemblance of the opening of You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman to the first measures of the Waldstein Sonata.) It was easy to derail him from his lesson