NEW YORK — George Perle, a composer, author, theorist and teacher who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986 and was widely considered the poetic voice of atonal composition, died Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

His wife, Shirley Perle, said he died after a long illness.

Perle composed for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and voice. An early admirer of the Second Viennese School — the group of composers led by Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg — he wrote many articles and books on its members’ 12-tone and Serial methods of atonal composition. But though he used aspects of those methods in his own composing, he never adopted them fully.

Instead, he developed an approach he called “12-tone tonality,” a seemingly contradictory term that suggested a middle path between those who rejected conventional tonality and those who considered atonality an unproductive break with the past.

Like the Serialists, Perle argued that if the 12 notes of the chromatic scale were treated equally, they would yield greater expressive possibilities than the seven-note major and minor scales that had dominated Western harmony for centuries.

The best of his works — Serenade No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra (1983), Six Etudes for Piano (1973-76), Wind Quintet No. 4 (1985) and “Critical Moments 2” (2001) — were striking not only for their elegance and ingenuity but also for the current of dry wit that revealed a vital and engaging musical personality.