Yeston, Mauiy

views updated

Yeston, Mauiy

Yeston, Mauiy, American composer and music theorist; b. Jersey City, N.J., Oct. 23,1945. He studied at Yale Univ. with Waite and Forte (B.A., 1967; Ph.D., 1974), subsequently joining the composition faculty there and becoming director of the BMI Musical Theater Workshop in N.Y. His first major stage work was the Broadway musical Nine (1982), based on Fellings movie 8 1/2, which won Tony and Drama Desk awards; it includes opulent recollections of Baroque and Romantic styles, continuing the operatic trend in musical theater established by Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. He also wrote incidental music for Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine and for Nukata, a musical written in Japanese and premiered in Tokyo. His theoretical writings are sophisticated; his Stratification of Musical Rhythm (New Haven, 1975), elucidates one of the only plausible theories on rhythmic structure yet proposed. He also ed. Readings in Schenker Analysis (New Haven, 1977). Among his compositions are a cello concerto (1977), Goya, a Life in Song (1987), and another musical, Grand Hotel (1989).

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire