Yates, Peter B.
Yates, Peter B.
Yates, Peter B., Canadian-American writer on music; b. Toronto, Nov. 30, 1909; d. N.Y., Feb. 25, 1976. He studied at Princeton Univ. (B.A., 1931). He married the pianist Frances Mullen in 1933. From 1937 to 1962 he was a functionary at the Calif. Dept. of Employment in Los Angeles, but this bureaucratic occupation did not preclude his activities as a musical catalyst. In 1939 he inaugurated on the rooftop of his house in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles a chamber concert series which was to become an important cultural enterprise in subcultural Calif., under the name “Evenings on the Roof,” he served as coordinator of these concerts from 1939 to 1954, when they were moved to a larger auditorium in downtown Los Angeles and became known as the “Monday Evening Concerts.” In 1968 he was appointed chairman of the music dept. at the State Univ. of N.Y. at Buffalo. He publ. An Amateur at the Keyboard (N.Y., 1964), Twentieth-Century Music (N.Y., 1967), and a collection of poems.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire