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"My goal is to connect with people emotionally. I
take life's experiences and translate them into music
--music that hopefully creates an impact on the
listener." - Yanni.
Yanni
Chrysomallis was born on November 14, 1954, in Kalamata,
Greece. After having spent quite a bit of time
swimming during his teenage years, he broke the national
freestyle record as a member of the Greek National
Swimming Team at the age of 14. It was also
while growing up that he began playing music. He
explains, "When I was growing up in Greece, my
parents really enjoyed classical music, so I listened to a
lot of it. I have a lot of musical influences:
all the classics, like Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin,
Stravinsky, Debussy..." "These people had the
ability to communicate without one word. That
just appealed to me. I'm doing this for the
same reason --- for music, not words. Words
operate in a different area of the brain. The
entire message is in the sounds and rhythm and
melody." His parents were
musically-inclined as well. "My mother
sings beautifully. My dad played the guitar and
sang...They were both in the arts." And
both were low-tech. "We didn't have a
turntable in our house. Instead of listening to
the music, we made it ourselves."
At the
age of 18, Yanni came to the U.S. to attend the University
of Minnesota. In 1976, after spending 3 and a
half years in college, he graduated with a major in
psychology, but quickly dropped this as a career path. He
bought a suit, took a job as an employment counselor, and
walked out after lunch on his first day. Instead,
he went back to his love of music, and at the age of 21,
took up keyboards. Around this time, he joined
a Minneapolis-based rock band called Chameleon. In
his late 20's, the band released an all-synthesizer album.
He
eventually moved to Hollywood with drummer Charlie Adams,
who he met in Chameleon, and started recording his own
compositions for the Private Music label. In
1986 he released his first album, "Keys to
Imagination."
Being
self-taught, he does not read or write the traditional
language of music --- he uses a unique form of musical
shorthand which he invented as a child and still uses
today: "I started playing music when I was six. I'd
go to a movie theatre sometimes and I liked the music and
knew that I'd like to hear it again. But where
I was growing up in Greece I couldn't just go out and buy
the soundtrack. So I'd go to the piano and try
to play it, but I'd forget it and then have to go back to
see the movie again," he laughs. "I
couldn't read music -- I was completely self-taught -- but
I do have perfect pitch, which is a very powerful tool if
you're a creative entity as I am. So I would
write down the chords in my own form of notation and then
when I went back to the piano I'd know what the notes
were." "And that's how I developed
perfect pitch -- out of necessity -- and that's why I
learned how to play the piano -- out of necessity --
because I was hearing music in my mind and I wanted to
play it."
The
process of hearing the music first in his mind and then
translating it for the ear is an integral part of his
creative expression when composing. "The
process of destruction begins," Yanni explains,
"when I take what I have composed in my mind and try
to record it so that everyone can hear it. Over
the years, I've become a better translator and look to
capture performance rather than perfection." And
how does his music get put on paper? "Whenever
I have a piece of music that I want to be written down I
take a keyboard and I record a part, the cello line for
instance, and I give it to an orchestrator who arranges it
for the instrument and writes it out."
Besides
not reading or writing music, Yanni creates his own
sounds: "I erase all the factory presets of all the
keyboards I've ever owned -- that's the first thing I
do."
He
prefers the term "instrumental" rather than
"New Age" for his music ---- "It's
["new age"] a loaded term with a lot of baggage. I'm
concerned that for people who have never heard my music,
the term might attribute qualities that aren't there. To
apply it ["new age"] to music, you bring the
baggage of what is implied, visions of people sitting on
mountaintops and chanting. If I had to call my
music something, it would be contemporary instrumental,
but I simply write music. I don't try to fit in
some category."
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