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Dr MARC YEATS: COMPOSER, RESEARCHER & VISUAL ARTIST

Described by the late Peter Maxwell Davies as “breathtakingly original” and by Professor Stephen Davismoon as “one of the most prolific and influential composers and creative artists of his generation in the UK”, Marc’s music explores a wide-ranging set of sonic and structural concerns. These include transduction, asynchronous and polytemporal alignments, complex surface relationships, contextual, harmonic, and temporal ambiguities, polarised intensities, and a visceral joy in sound.

Marc is the originator of timecode-supported polytemporal music—a radical compositional methodology that dissolves traditional ensemble coordination. His works in this format abandon conductors and unified scores in favour of independent, fully notated parts that performers realise individually using timecodes and mobile stopwatches. The result is a dynamic interplay of unsynchronised temporalities, unique to each performance, yet held together by a stable overarching architecture.

Marc’s long-standing partnership with the BBC began over two decades ago with a broadcast of his flute quartet by the Edinburgh String Quartet. Landmark moments include I See Blue (BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Martin Brabbins), PAGAN II (premiered by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies), a piano concerto for Kathryn Stott, and Rhema for solo harpsichord, performed by Mahan Esfahani. In 2021, his large ensemble work the unimportance of events was premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at Tectonics Glasgow and selected by BBC Radio 3 to represent the UK at the International Rostrum of Composers in Belgrade. Most recently, in 2024, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra premiered A Point in the Landscape, further cementing Marc’s ongoing relationship with the orchestra.

Marc’s works have been performed by a wide range of international artists and ensembles including the London Sinfonietta, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Suono Giallo, Chamber Cartel, XelmYa, Psappha, Ian Pace, and many others. His music is published by Composers Edition.

Marc is also an accomplished landscape painter. You can explore his visual art here: Marc’s Paintings.

Timecode-Supported Polytemporal Music and Obsessive Self-Borrowing

My compositional methodology, timecode-supported polytemporal music, proposes a radical departure from traditional ensemble coordination by eliminating conductors, click-tracks, and unified scores. Instead, performers reference embedded timecodes individually via mobile stopwatches, loosely synchronised at the start of the performance. Each musician follows a fully notated, through-composed part at an independent tempo, resulting in decoupled, unsynchronised layers of sound. Timecodes, displayed above each bar as minutes and seconds, guide performers through durations and transitions, enabling a rough synchronisation with the digital clock during the performance. The closer this alignment, the closer the rendition reflects the intended compositional structure.

This methodology embraces temporal indeterminacy—what I term sonic flux—by containing it within local interactions while preserving the piece’s global structural coherence. Though the vertical alignment of events varies from performance to performance, the overarching architecture remains broadly stable. Each performance becomes a unique iteration, shaped by the interaction between the performers’ interpretive decisions and the structural cues encoded in the score and timecode.

In this environment, every player becomes a soloist, granted temporal, expressive, interpretive, and spatial freedoms rarely afforded in conducted music. The audibility of distinct polytemporal layers becomes secondary to the fluid, transformative relationships this method enables between players and their material, generating unique experiences for performers and audiences alike.

At the core of my practice lies a systematic and deliberate process of obsessive self-borrowing. Materials from earlier works are continuously reused and transformed through cycles of manipulation, tempo alterations, algorithmic pitch restructuring, and rhythmic splicing. Tempo transformations, often implemented as controlled reductions, allow for real-time time-stretching without disrupting rhythmic proportions, enabling multiple temporalities to coexist meaningfully. While rhythm is a fixed and autonomous scaffold, pitch remains freely mutable, creating a harmonic openness reminiscent of isorhythmic techniques.

These transformed materials are assembled into a digital compositional model that is a generative source for audio and instrumental parts. The resulting structures are intentionally flexible, designed to adapt to varying performance contexts without sacrificing coherence. I position my work as subjective yet systematically constructed, with each performance representing a valid realisation, though some may more closely align with my compositional expectations than others.

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