Roy Yates Interview, p. 4

Yates: Yes. I'm really focusing on that right now. I came up with this method years ago, because I knew that in the Renaissance period people's names were used in writing music. For instance, Bach used his own name as the theme for his last and greatest unfinished work, "The Art of theFugue." He used "B." "A," "C," "H." Now, in German notation"B" means "B-flat," then "A" and "C", and "H" means "B." And there are all kinds of anagrams hidden like that. I first started experimenting with using this as a method of determining several elements in the composition such as the frequency of chords, or the number of beats. In one composition I used a whole series of multiplications to control every aspect of the piece including orchestration. To some people it seems very manipulative but it's like a very intricate web, and the results have been very interesting. So, as that developed, my interest went in that direction. In the last fifteen years, most of my music has been based on that method. I don't use conventional harmony anymore. The work in progress that you've heard has been based on this sort of approach, mostly the use of names. It is true that I bring to that a certain intuition, if I careto use it, about the person, and there is the question of instrumentation and the form. When do you change the chords? When should you reverse the melody. Should you have a two part or a four part canon? Should you harmonize it? All of these questions come up. One of the reasons this music sounds more melodious than my previous music that you've heard is because I've begun using what is called the modal scale. Before that I'd used the chromatic twelve toned scale. When you use the twelve tone scale you get a lot more variety, and you also get a lot more dissonance. The construction of melodies from the twelve tone scale will be a lot more angular and not so easily remembered. When you go back to the modal scales you get something that is really quite fundamental. It's much easier to remember.

DXM: Would it be fair to say, then, that in general, your approach to composing is to minimize the "personal decision making" involved, as much as possible?

Yates: Yes. In other words, what I've tried to do is remove that subjective element of "I like," or "I don't like." Now, when I hear it, I might say, "Okay, I like that," or "It's not so good."

DXM: I guess this entire question of the "subjective" vs. the"objective" puzzles me somehow.

Yates: I think it's difficult to talk about "subjective" and "objective" without defining a little more clearly what I mean by those terms. Now when I was younger I was writing very "Romantic" and even very "Modern" kinds of music because I had a lot of stuff I wanted to express about me, my feelings. But in my lexicon right now that's not so important. What I mean by "objective" would simply refer to that which is more involved with the principles, or laws of music, or certain fundamental laws, and how they come through in the music. If a person feels something from that, even if I feel something from it, it's secondary to the structure, you might say.

So the subjective element would enter at the point where I start making my selections on the music paper through my inner listening to how it's going, because there are always points at which you have to make choices in relation to what you're going to do next. I will either map it out (which I have done a lot of, that is, making the decisions ahead of time) or I "kind of" map it out and then at certain points I have to figure out what is needed, because you have to do something. And I think those decisions come from my subconscious.

DXM: I guess what I'm curious about is what is it that interests you in attempting to follow a "less subjective" approach?

Yates: Objective art, in the sense of a more universal kind of transmission of something.

DXM: So, you construct a composition through a some kind of formula, and you get a result. When you get this result, or, in the process of getting it, how would you know if you were getting "objective" art?

Yates: Well, only in the sense that, if there is a result, and I had not intended to get a particular response, then "I file that" -how I got that response- and it becomes part of what you might say is my compositional repertoire.

DXM: Are you saying that you're pretty detached about all this?

Yates: I wouldn't say that. No.

DXM: I guess that's what I'm really interested in, because I wonder if there isn't something very personal about all of this for you?

Yates: Let me clarify that for you. I love what I'm doing- more than anything else I've ever done, in my life. I love it.

(Laughs) I've written music all my life. I just never got any recognition for it, and never had a chance to get any remunerations from it, so it was a kind of struggle. And as I got older and had less energy I began to do less of it, and part of me got pretty unhappy about it, and disappointed. So to have this, all of a sudden, flare up in less than a year is kind of miraculous -- from my personal, subjective point of view.

DXM: I'd be very interested if you could say more about what itis you love about it.

Yates: That's like... Well, I love music, and I've always loved music. It's the essence of... for me, it's almost the essence of everything. It has been a major factor in my life, even though I'm not a professional musician. I was never trained, but still, because of this I spent a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of effort in listening, studying, and writing music. For no...obviously, up until recently, you might say, for no possible financial gain, in fact, it cost me money, what little I have. So, there is something Joseph Campbell said, I can't remember the term, I think he uses the term "bliss" or something, he encourages people to find, to pursue...

DXM: "Follow your bliss"...

Yates: Well, that's it. Then you see, I'm wondering how many other people have that opportunity. And is there anything I can do to help them with that? Because it's a freeing thing in a way that nothing else is, really.

DXM: Would you care to speculate, to try to put in language, what that bliss might be about?

Yates: ...My life, my sense of participation in it, my sense of presence...and that of others, and very much, "the big picture," so to speak. The relationship to nature. It was something that when I first heard music, when I was very young, it was directly connected with that whole sense of being here, of listening to this. Listening, right now. It was wonderful. So, that's a way of changing one's consciousness, very much.

DXM: It's difficult to speak of it in a certain way, I guess, but, it makes one more alive, or more vibrant.

Yates: You remember that quotation of Stravinsky's ?

DXM: Tell me again...

Yates: Well, this is from an early autobiography written in 1938. "...I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which by tacit and inveterate agreement we have lent it, thrust upon it as a label, a convention; in short, an aspect, unconsciously, or by force of habit we have come to confuse with its essential being. Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present. By th eimperfection of his nature man is doomed to submit to the passage of time, to its categories of past and future, without ever being able to give substance, and therefore stability, to the category of the present. The phenomenon of music is given to us for the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the co-ordination between man and time. To be put into practice, its indispensable and single requirement is construction. Construction, once completed, this order has been attained and there is nothing more to be said. It would be futile to look for, or expect, anything else from it. It is precisely this construction, this achieved order, which produces in us a unique emotion having nothing in common with our ordinary sensations and our responses to the impressions of daily life."

DXM: That's a pretty amazing quotation.

Yates: Now, somehow that comes closer to something I have wondered about in connection with music. I've read this to several people who are interested in music and who are somewhat practiced musicians, and it's hard, it's tough, because this whole question of expression...he just completely puts it as a secondary artifact of culture. And yet, for someone who really knows how to listen into the music, I think he's right. But, I'm still interested in the question of, regardless of what Stravinsky says-do these sentic shapes that Manfred Clynes talks about really exist? Well, it's this question of time and music which is so important, and so hard to...[ laughs I There's no other art quite like it. It's related fundamentally to the whole question of vibrations. We here on this planet experience music through sound vibrations in the air. But who knows? I mean the triad of what we call "music" is, I think, universal. And it can take place in very different media and still be music.

DXM: What do you mean by "the triad of music."

Yates: A vibration, a substance, and a context. The context could be the structure of an instrument. It could be a room. It could be inside the rock. it could be in the upper atmosphere. It could be in outer space. It could be in the dirt.

DXM: Well, there is the question of what is, and what isn't music. That's a gray area, I suppose. Where does music begin and where does it end, and where does noise begin and end ?

Yates: And people are experimenting with that nowadays. There are people now who give concerts of noise. I mean, it's definitely noise. But people are interested in that. So that's an interesting point. One of the things my partner, Pika, is doing is going into what he calls "organic music." He'll go into a room, for instance, and he'll look around at the objects in the room. He'll determine what he can do to them, or with them,to make a sound preferably one with a distinctive pitch but not necessarily. And he'll then hit, scrape, bow, blow into, knock, etc. objects and make recordings of them. Then he'll edit them and work with this sound material until he's got a piece of "music," a piece of organized sound-that's the sound of your living room-him playing your living room [laughs]. And I've been encouraging him to follow it through because I think it's very marketable, as well as very clever. And some of it is really extraordinary. The question is, "Is that music?" Now, a lot of it is relative to culture. For instance, a lot of the reviews of Beethoven's First Symphony, if you can imagine-some of the reviewers said it wasn't music but just noise. If you look through the literature of reviews of new music during the time when it was first played, people will say that a lot.

DXM: I don't suppose we're going to answer that one. You have mentioned the importance of listening to music and that word, "listening" comes up. You mentioned once that one of the things that impressed you so much about John Cage was how he got people to listen. I'd be very interested in what you have to say about just listening.

Yates: Well, let's start with John Cage. You know his piece for the piano, I think it's called, "Three Minutes and Thirty Seven Seconds." He arranged things so that one of the alternatives you've got while you're there is to actually listen. Not to the piano, because it's not doing anything, but to the sound around you. And of course, he experimented with that a lot. Now that's a particular kind of listening which is kind of forced on the audience by the arrangements. But it has one thing that is very important and that is that it's attentive. It has a factor of attention that is very different than the kind of attention we have when we get into the elevator and there's muzak going on. Or even the kind of attention we have when we like to work, even with good music in the background while we are doing something else. But if you are going to understand music you've got to put your attention on it in the same way that you would hopefully be able to put your attention on other aspects of yourself; with an attention that is very full and moves in time as the music is moving so that you don't miss anything. And, of course, that's almost impossible. But if you keep trying you get better at it. Now, when you're actually performing then you understand it better. One of the interesting things about the practice of Gregorian chant, for instance-and this is from the director of the "Schola Cantorum" in an article he wrote. He was speaking of the uses of the chant when you're in the circumstances of the church and you're chanting. Since it's very monotonous in a way-there's no harmony, there's just a line and you're singing it with others and you've got to keep in tune - said that if you keep your attention on it you are going to discover that the contents of your mind are very chaotic. You constantly have to keep coming back. You get lost and you come back.And you can't avoid this kind of confrontation with yourself that you wouldn't have ordinarily. And in that context, listening brings you to a state of what you might call awareness of yourself-and your mind--that you wouldn't have otherwise. Because your intention is related to your attention, and is actually producing sound so that you can verify it moment by moment through the flow of time. When you sit down to listen to a piece of music say, for yourself, at home, which I try to do regularly, you don't do anything else but that. Actually, nothing else. You find, for instance, that if you pick a piece you personally, just subjectively like to listen to, and you try to do that, you'll discover that you've never really listened to it. Now, the thing is with most of us, we don't usually have any reason to listen that way. If we're professional musicians we have to learn how to do that, to a certain extent, until it becomes mechanical, in a way, see? I've been interested in conductors- I always kind of wanted to be a conductor when I was very young-and this quality of attention moving in the present moment, all of the time, is vital to keeping track of all these things that are going on simultaneously when an orchestra is playing a piece of music. And that's kind of what I mean when I say, "attentive listening." It's a work. It's an actual...it's very different from saying, "Oh God, I just want to hear this piece," you know, and just soaking it in. It's fine.That's wonderful, and you should do that. But, as a work of improving one's attention and certain subtle aspects that are involved in that, it doesn't involve that.

DXM: Have you discovered that listening...let's see, how to put this, and I'm sure you can say something about it. Let me just describe my own impression. It seems to me quite clear that the listening function is different from the thinking function, or what we call "thinking." If I am able to listen, my mental activity changes. There is something like a mode shift. I don't quite know how to put it concisely, but do you see what I am trying to get at?

Yates: You're right. I agree with you. The intellectual part doesn't know how to listen, period, as far as I'm concerned. It can analyze what it hears, if it hears anything. Listening comes from deep in the instinct, the instinctual part of us shared with creation. Particularly in the world where we live, the surface of this planet where there's air, animals listen. They have to. Because their survival depends on it. When you see an animal listening to something, you see full attention. No question about it. So, it's from that source coming up through us, a so-called higher organism, that's the source of our capacity to listen if we knew how.

DXM: That's wonderful. I've never heard the connection made just that way before.

Yates: You feel that. Now, you see that's where some of this emotion, if I can put it this way, may originate in connection with these basic abstract emotions, because these are not personal egoistic emotions. But if you contact that through your listening, it goes right up your spine. It comes into you in a way that actually, for awhile, may even put things in order-- because I also believe that by listening this way regularly you'll begin to hear things that are missing in you, that you need.

DXM: Could you say more about that?

Yates: I've had experiences of this for a long, long time. It's one of the reasons I do it. It's a kind of practice, and a help. It explains, to a certain extent, the hunger people have for certain kinds of music, which is quite beyond any kind of surface, like-dislike thing. It's a hunger. And sometimes if a person has this sense of hunger -it's like a physical ache, like being hungry- if you listen at that time you'll know what it means, because it's food. It's filling something in you that's gone away, that you've lost... temporarily, probably. And at other times the same piece of music won't work that way. And I believe this comes from this deep instinctual side of us. It's the one thing that connects us, along with sight, to the big world where we live, in a way, like nothing else does.