Arthur Berger

Composer, born in New York City, New York, USA. After studies at Harvard and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he began an active career in composition and criticism. His works show influences ranging from Neoclassicism to the atonal tradition. He also enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a teacher at Brandeis University (1953–80), professor emeritus from 1980.

Arthur Berger (May 15, 1912 in New York, NY - 7 October 2003) was a composer who has been described as a New Mannerist.

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.

He founded, in 1962, Perspectives of New Music, which he edited.

His works show a preoccupation with vertical and horizontal musical space (see pitch space). 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."

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).

Berger is grouped in the "Boston school" along with Lukas Foss, Irving Fine, Alexie Haieff, Harold Shapero, and Claudio Spies.