Maury Yeston
Life and career[edit]
Early years[edit]
Yeston was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. His father, David, was born in England and founded the Dial Import Corporation, an importing and exporting firm, which his mother, Frances née Haar, helped to run.[5] The family loved music; his mother was an accomplished pianist, and father sang English music hall songs at home.[5] Yeston noted in a 1997 interview: "My mother was trained in classical piano, and her father was a cantor in a synagogue. A lot of musical theatre writers have something in common. Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Kurt Weill – each one had a cantor in the family. When you take a young, impressionable child and put him at age three in the middle of a synagogue, and that child sees a man in a costume, dramatically raised up on a kind of stage, singing his heart out at the top of his lungs to a rapt congregation, it makes a lasting impression."[6] At age five, Yeston began taking piano lessons from his mother, and by age seven he had won an award for composition. He attended the Yeshiva of Hudson County through grade eight. Yeston's interest in musical theatre began at age ten when his mother took him to see My Fair Lady on Broadway. At Jersey Academy, a small private high school in Jersey City, Yeston broadened his musical study beyond classical and religious music and Broadway show tunes to include jazz, folk, rock and roll, and early music. He took up folk guitar, played vibraphone with a jazz group, and participated in madrigal singing.[7]
As an undergraduate at Yale University Yeston majored in music theory and composition, writing an atonal sonata for piano, incidental music for a production of Brecht’s Life of Galileo, and a cello concerto that won Yale's Friends of Music Prize,[8] and minored in philosophy and literature, particularly French, German, Italian and Japanese. Yeston noted, "I am as much a lyricist as a composer, and the musical theatre is the only genre I know in which the lyrics are as important as the music."[7] After graduating from Yale in 1967, Yeston attended Clare College, Cambridge University on a two-year Mellon Fellowship where he continued his studies in musicology and composition. There, he belonged to Cambridge Footlights Dramatic Club and wrote several classical pieces, including a set of atonal songs for soprano and a chamber piece ("Trilogues") for three string quartets in addition to a musical version of Alice in Wonderland, eventually produced at the Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut in 1971. At Cambridge, he focused his musical goals, moving from classical composition to theatre songwriting.[9] Upon earning his master's degree there, Yeston returned to the United States to accept a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to teach for a year at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the country's oldest traditionally black college. At Lincoln, Yeston taught music, art history, philosophy and Western Civilization, and founded Lincoln's course in the history of African-American music.[9]
He then pursued a musicology doctorate at Yale, teaching the same African-American music history course there that he had taught at Lincoln. While there, he enrolled in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop, traveling to New York City each week, where he and other aspiring composer/lyricists, including Ed Kleban, Alan Menken, and Howard Ashman,[10] were able to try out material for established Broadway producers and directors. He completed his Ph.D. at Yale in 1974, with his dissertation published as a book by Yale University Press: The Stratification of Musical Rhythm (1976),[11] Soon afterwards, his cello concerto was premiered by Yo-Yo Ma and the Norwalk Symphony with Gilbert Levine conducting.[12] He then joined the Yale Music Dept. faculty where he taught for eight years, ultimately becoming Yale's Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music.[13] He subsequently published another theory book with Yale University Press, Readings in Schenker Analysis and Other Approaches (editor, 1977),[14] (both of his books are noted for their discussions of rhythmic structure and Schenkerian analysis)[15] and was twice cited by the student body as one of Yale's ten best professors.[7]
Yeston served on the board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Dramatists’ Guild Council, the Kurt Weill Foundation Publication Project and the editorial board of Musical Quarterly; he is a past president of the Kleban Foundation, an advisor to the Yale University Press Broadway Series.[55] He is an honorary ambassador of the Society of Composers & Lyricists, and a founding member of the Society for Music Theory.