Dr MARC YEATS: COMPOSER, RESEARCHER & VISUAL ARTIST
His music is performed, commissioned and broadcast worldwide. Primary concerns are transduction, complex surface relationships, asynchronous and polytemporal alignments, contextual, harmonic and temporal ambiguities, polarised intensities, and a visceral joy of sound.
About Marc Yeats
Dr Marc Yeats (music composition) is one of the UK’s leading contemporary composers with his works having been performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and stations across Europe, Asia and Australasia. Described by Peter Maxwell Davies as “breathtakingly original”, and 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 transduction, complex sonic, perceptual, asynchronous and polytemporal relationships, sonic flux, contextual, harmonic and temporal ambiguities, polarised intensities and a visceral joy of sound. You can find out about Marc’s work as a landscape painter by visiting his painting website here: Marc’s paintings.
Marc’s music has received performances around the world including The Edinburgh String Quartet (UK), the Chamber Group of Scotland (UK), Psappha (UK), Geert Callaert (BE), the London Sinfonietta (UK), the Endymion Ensemble (UK), Paragon Ensemble (UK), the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (UK), 175 East (N.Z.), Sarah Watts, SCAW (UK), Sarah Nicolls, Federico Mondelci, Contempo Ensemble (Italy), Rarescale (UK), Carla Rees (UK), The Scottish Clarinet Quartet (UK), Symposia (UK), the New York Miniaturists Ensemble (US), Trio IAMA (Greece), Dirk Amrein (Germany) Expatrio (UK), Chroma (UK), Kokoro (UK), Consortium5 (UK), Gleb Kanasevich (US) Ensemble Amorpha (UK), Meridian Brass (UK), Syzygy Ensemble (AU) Chamber Cartel (US) Carlton Vickers (US), XelmYa (DE), Ian Pace (UK), Ensemble Suono Giallo (IT) the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and BBC Scottish Symphomy Orchestra (UK), the Hallé Orchestra and Chorus (UK) conducted by Sir Mark Elder, Tokyo City Philharmonic (JP) and Gewandhaus Radio Orchestra (DE), for example.
Marc’s relationship with the BBC is both strong and enduring, starting with a BBC Scotland broadcast by the Edinburgh String Quartet of his flute quartet more than 20 years ago. His first orchestral work – I See Blue – conducted by Martin Brabbins with the BBC Philharmonic, received much acclaim when first performed and broadcast around the same time. Following shortly after, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies conducted the premiere of PAGAN II, again with the BBC Philharmonic for broadcast on BBC Radio 3. This led to specific BBC commissions, including a piano concerto for Kathryn Stott and the BBC Philharmonic to open Piano 2000 in Manchester, and later, a solo harpsichord piece ‘Rhema’, performed by Mahan Esfahani and broadcast in 2010 by BBC Radio 3 from the Clothworkers’ Centenary Concert Hall in Leeds. Most recently, Marc’s timecode-supported polytemporal composition the unimportance of events for 22-players was premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as part of Tectonics Glasgow 2021. It will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at a future date. This work has also been selected by BBC Radio 3 as one of three works representing the U.K. at the 2021 International Rostrum of Composers in Belgrade. More information here.
Selection as one of just 10 to attend the legendary Hoy Summer School in 1994 brought Marc into contact with the late Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. At the completion of the course, Max was keen to support and promote Marc’s work and conducted his first commission with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the St. Magnus Festival in 1997. He and Marc continued to share ideas, and Max took a great interest in Marc’s visual art and compositional work with mobile technologies and a range of timecode-supported polytemporal structural approaches to composition.
Marc’s music is published through Composers Edition.
My pieces often have no score. They are performed from parts alone.
These compositions are called timecode-supported polytemporal music. They operate without a conductor, click-tracks, or a traditional score. Instead, music is performed from fully notated individual instrumental parts, all operating at simultaneously different speeds. In this unique approach, the players are responsible for unfolding the piece. To achieve this, they utilise a timecode, represented as minutes and seconds above each bar in their parts, to indicate the duration and the passage of time. Players also use individual mobile phone stopwatches, loosely synchronised at the start of the piece, that display clock-time passing to provide coordination. The goal is to achieve a rough synchronisation between the timecode and digital clock time during the performance. The closer this synchronisation, the closer the rendition reflects the intended compositional structure. This unfolding process does not yield precisely repeatable performance outcomes. The balance between my intentions conveyed through notation and the players’ interpretations using timecode and stopwatches makes the vertical alignment of its details during each performance a unique iteration. At the same time, the global architecture of the piece remains broadly stable.
In this music, the audibility of polytemporal layers is secondary to the fluid, quicksilver and transformative relationships the method enables between players and their materials. Generating unique experiences for audiences, ensembles, and orchestras, each player is a soloist, performing in their independent tempi and enjoying temporal, expressive, interpretive, and spatial freedoms that are difficult to achieve within the framework of conducted music.
Would you like to become a patron and personally support my composition work through a regular monthly donation?
If so, you’ll be pleased to know this is now possible through Music Patron. To find out how to support me and more about Music Patron, click on the ‘support me on music Patron’ button. 100% of every Music Patron donation goes to the composer.