Clergyman's

Do we really have to look these chords up in Forte's catalog in order to find a name for them? Another theorist assures us that, 'Allen Forte's perceptive interpretation...accounts for an essential quality of this mysteriously pulsating music. The eighth-note chords of the flute and clarinets form alternately, with the sustaining oboes and horns, the six-tone sonorities labeled A and B. The sonorities A and B are both representatives of the same set class and are thus made up of precisely the same intervals. As Forte points out, ""There is a flucuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant.""' 'A fluctuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant' is what the rest of us have always known as 'a transposition.'
- George Perle

I would not want you to suppose that my rejection of Allen Forte's theory of pitch-class sets implies a rejection of the notion that there can be such a thing as a pitch-class set. It is only when one defines everything in terms of pitch-class sets that the concept becomes meaningless.
- George Perle

Every bit of theorizing I’ve ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing.
- George Perle