Arthur Berger (May 15, 1912 in New York City –- October 7, 2003 in Boston, Massachusetts) was a composer who has been described as a New Mannerist. He studied as an undergraduate at New York University, during which time he joined the Young Composer's Group, as a graduate student under Walter Piston at Harvard, and with Nadia Boulanger and at the Sorbonne under a Paine Fellowship. May 15 is the 135th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (136th in leap years). ... 1912 (MCMXII) was a leap year starting on Monday in the Gregorian calendar (or a leap year starting on Tuesday in the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... October 7 is the 280th day of the year (281st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A composer is a person who writes music. ... Mannerism is the usual English term for an approach to all the arts, particularly painting but not exclusive to it, a reaction to the High Renaissance, emerging after the Sack of Rome in 1527 shook Renaissance confidence, humanism and rationality to their foundations, and even Religion had split apart. ... New York University (NYU) is a major research university in New York City. ... Walter Hamor Piston Jr. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... Nadia Boulanger (September 16, 1887 – October 22, 1979) was an influential composer, conductor, and music professor. ... The Sorbonne, Paris, in a 17th century engraving The historic University of Paris (French: ) first appeared in the second half of the 12th century, but was in 1970 reorganised as 13 autonomous universities (University of Paris I–XIII). ...

He taught briefly at Mills College and Brooklyn College, then worked briefly at the New York Sun and then for a longer period of time at the New York Herald Tribune. In 1953 he left the paper to teach at Brandeis University where he was eventually named the Irving Fine Professor Emeritus. He taught occasionally at the New England Conservatory during his retirement. Mills College is a liberal arts womens college in Oakland, California. ... Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York. ... The original New York Sun began publication September 3, 1833, as a morning newspaper, and an evening edition began in 1887. ... The New York Herald Tribune was a newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald. ... Brandeis University is a private university in Waltham, Massachusetts, United States. ... Irving Fine (December 3, 1914–August 23, 1962) was a US composer. ... The Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra performing in Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory of Music. ...

He founded, in 1962, Perspectives of New Music, which he edited. He wrote the first book on Aaron Copland (reprinted 1990, Da Capo Press), and coined the terms octatonic scale and pitch centricity in his "Problems of Pitch Organization in Stravinsky". Perspectives of New Music is a journal founded in 1962 by Arthur Berger and dedicated to music theory of new music. ... Aaron Copland Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990) was an American composer of concert and film music. ... In music, a diminished scale (set 8-28) is a scale in which the notes of the scale ascend in alternating intervals of a whole step and a half step. ... The tonic is the first note of a musical scale, and in the tonal method of musical composition it is extremely important. ...

His works show a preoccupation with vertical and horizontal musical space (see pitch space). His musical influences include Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and later Anton Webern. In the forties he composed neoclassical works including Serenade Concertante (1944) and Three Pieces for Strings (1945), and embraced the twelve-tone technique in the fifties. His later works moved away from serialism but continued to use tone cluster 'cells' whose pitch classes are displaced by octaves. George Perle has described his "keen and sophisticated musical intellect" and praised "his serial music [for being] as far removed from current fashionable trends as his diatonic music was a few years ago." Perle further praises his String Quartet, "in the quartet, as in Berger's earlier works, and in most of the great music of our Western heritage, timbre, texture, dynamics, rhythm, and form are elements of a musical language whose syntax and grammar are essentially derived from pitch relations. If these elements never seem specious and arbitrary, as they do with so many of the dodecaphonic productions that deluge us today from both the left and right, it is precisely because of the authenticity and integrity of his musical thinking at this basic level." In music pitch space is the modeling of pitch relationships, represented through mathematical models, most often multidimensional, describing how near or far pitches are from each other. ... Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (Russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский, Igor Fëdorovič Stravinskij) (June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971) was a Russian composer best known for three compositions from his earlier, Russian period: LOiseau de feu (The Firebird) (1910), Petrushka (1911), and Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913). ... Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1948 Schoenberg redirects here. ... Anton Webern (December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945) was an Austrian composer. ... Serialism is a technique for composing music that uses sets to describe musical elements, and allows the composer manipulations of those sets to create music. ... In music and music theory a pitch class contains all notes that have the same name; for example, all Es, no matter which octave they are in, are in the same pitch class. ... In music, an octave (sometimes abbreviated 8ve or 8va) is the interval between one musical note and another with half or double the frequency. ... George Perle (born May 6, 1915 in Bayonne, New Jersey) is a composer and musicologist who has studied with Ernst Krenek. ... In Music theory, the diatonic major scale (also known as the Guido scale), from the Greek diatonikos or to stretch out, is a fundamental building block of the European-influenced musical tradition. ...

His works include Ideas of Order, Polyphony, Quartet for Winds, described by Thomson as "one of the most satisfactory pieces for winds in the whole modern repertory", String Quartet (1958), Five Pieces for Piano (1969) and Septet (1965-66). He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Berger is grouped in the "Boston school" along with Lukas Foss, Irving Fine, Alexie Haieff, Harold Shapero, and Claudio Spies. Lukas Foss (born Lukas Fuchs, August 15, 1922 in Berlin, Germany) is an American composer and conductor. ... Irving Fine (December 3, 1914–August 23, 1962) was a US composer. ... Harold Samuel Shapero (born 29 April 1920) is an American composer. ...

External links

• Arthur Berger Official Website
• Art of the States: Arthur Berger