It is shown that the dynamical evolution of perturbations on a static
spacetime is governed by a standard pulsation equation for the extrinsic
curvature tensor. The centerpiece of the pulsation equation is a wave operator
whose spatial part is manifestly self-adjoint. In contrast to metric
formulations, the curvature-based approach to gravitational perturbation theory
generalizes in a natural way to self-gravitating matter fields. For a certain
relevant subspace of perturbations the pulsation operator is symmetric with
respect to a positive inner product and therefore allows spectral theory to be
applied. In particular, this is the case for odd-parity perturbations of
spherically symmetric background configurations. As an example, the pulsation
equations for self-gravitating, non-Abelian gauge fields are explicitly shown
to be symmetric in the gravitational, the Yang Mills, and the off-diagonal
sector.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, no figure