George Perle described his journey as 'a path toward a new kind of tonality. Music that was going to do what music used to do, with its basis being the twelve-tone scale instead of the diatonic scale'. Annotator Christopher Hailey writes that 'It is not necessary to go into analytical details because what Perle created was a language of such cogency and immediate appeal that no technical knowledge is necessary for its appreciation. It is music that is bracing without being strident, vigorous without being disjointed, sharply etched without being dryly acerbic; it is witty, lucid, stimulating, and, above all, deeply humane'.

With this new recording, the Seattle Symphony, cellist Jay Campbell, and conductor Ludovic Morlot present five previously unrecorded works by the American master George Perle.