Marshall Yaeger has been an unusual innovator in many disparate fields, including television soap opera (for which he became the first Head Writer to explore certain sexually innovative themes), fundraising special events (for which he helped create the "glamour events" of the 1980s, single-handedly raising millions of dollars for medical research), and health (recently creating the first weight management techniques to pass five-year "Phase I" clinical trials with 100% efficacy).
Yaeger's written works include more than a dozen plays produced around the country, as well as books about health and consciousness. Many people (and several book reviewers) consider his biography of the most successful organist that ever lived [Virgil Fox (The Dish)] a masterpiece.
In the 1970s, Yaeger invented and patented the first improvement to the projecting kaleidoscope (which was an improvement developed in the 1920s to Brewster's Nineteenth Century invention). Yaeger had been one of Virgil Fox's managers that brought the $350/concert artist together with light machines (an attraction that Yaeger named "Heavy Organ") to raise Fox's fee to $10,000/concert 20 years later.
Curious about how light shows work (usually with rock performers, as at the Fillmore East, where Fox premiered "Heavy Organ"), Yaeger came across an invention called the "Phantasmagorion," which combined the images from two separate projecting kaleidoscopes to create much more interesting patterns. Why couldn't one kaleidoscopic image be projected through a second kaleidoscope? Yaeger wondered. Since the only reason seemed to be that no one had thought of it, Yaeger proceeded to build an optical projector that did precisely that. Thus was born the "Kaleidoplex" (originally called the "Harmonic Mandala Machine"). Over the next few decades, Yaeger created a number of visualized musical pieces, which were projected optically and recorded on videotape.
Along the way, Yaeger took his optical projector around the country to perform live at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, the Bottom Line in Manhattan, and, in 2002 (both live and on projected videotape), at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The basic design of the patented optical invention was to project the image of a kaleidoscope through a second (and sometimes, a third) kaleidoscope, creating a complex image of beauty and harmonious symmetry.
In 2002, Yaeger went on to adapt his optical invention digitally, thereby creating the "Kaleidoplex Digital Light Organ." (Digital electronics made precise calculations possible that can accompany recorded musical performances exactly to the beat, with 1/2 second precision.) For the first time, computers could begin creating an amazing library of digital collage works to accompany pipe and electronic organ music. Yaeger's creations became part of the "Kaleidoplex Collection," which is currently marketed by SEEmusicDVD and distributed by The Orchard.
His most recently released digital collages include "Sonic Bloom" (2003); "Heavy Organ" (2003); "The Bach Gamut, Volume I" (2004); "Virgil Fox Plays The John Wanamaker Grand Court Organ," which was recorded in Philadelphia in 1964 and "digitally-collaged" 40 years later; "Heavy Organ: Tribute to Virgil Fox" (2004); "Virgil Fox: The Bach Gamut, Volume II" (2005); "Mars & Venus: Trinity Church Wall Street" (2005); "Opus 1: Trinity Church Wall Street" (2006); and "Pictures at an Exhibition" (2006).
Yaeger is the first digital collage artist to use electronics to manipulate elaborately symmetrical mirror images (as many as 21,000,000 in a single frame in a 3-generation kaleidoscopic image) in order to engage the viewer's brain in an esthetic mélange of absolute symmetry. The prevailing images are subjected to the same geometrical rules (based on the octal system in tripartite divisions) that distinguish most Tibetan "mandalas," for example, as well as the stained glass rose windows of the great European cathedrals, such as Chartres. Since these symmetries are often assumed to have great spiritual powers, as has been written about the distinguished video artist Bill Viola, "…Since the early 1970s, he has used video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experience: birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness; and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach."
Unlike Viola, however, Yaeger has been careful to avoid any consideration of his art form that might suggest any medical, spiritual, religious, or supernatural influences or effects. He considers the effects of his invention on the brain and emotions to be entirely physical (that is, electrical and chemical) and therefore wholly scientifically explicable.
Thus, Yaeger has based his art more on science than mysticism. For example, while studying at the University of California (from which Yaeger graduated, Phi Beta Kappa), where he was taking a "gifted student's" tutorial course in physiological psychology, he was tested for brain function according to an hypothesis current at that time: that some people are "visualizers," whose occipital lobes never produce sine waves during consciousness, while others are "rationalizers," whose occipital lobes always produce sine waves, conscious or not. The vast majority of people's occipital lobes produce sine waves while eyes are closed, and jagged waves while eyes are open. Yaeger tested as a "visualizer," which explained, to him, why, when viewing the results of his invention, he invariably experienced a "rush" when certain patterns emerged. He found that television engineers that viewed his invention (which appeared briefly on cable television in its earliest days) never "got" it. He surmised that the reason was that engineers are almost always "rationalizers." Musicians, on the other hand (such as Paul Winter, who more than anyone, invented "New-Age Music," and pianist and presidential appointee, Samuel Lipman - both of whom Yaeger managed, as well as Julius Bloom, the most famous of Carnegie Hall's managers, and the New-Age Japanese composer, Kitaro - who wanted to use Yaeger's Kaleidoplex in Radio City Music Hall) went wild over the images. Most other viewers take about 20 minutes "to get into it," and then experience a deeply esthetic encounter with music not otherwise possible. Yaeger realized that the esthetic effect is almost certainly the result of certain neurotransmitters (probably mainly norepinephrine) generated by visual symmetries that send timed and spatially balanced signals simultaneously to opposite sides of the brain. (It generally takes 20 minutes for neurotransmitter effects to take effect, which explains why overweight people - another group of human beings that has benefited from Yaeger's innovations - tend to eat too much before eating-generated serotonin creates a feeling of "fullness" in the intestines.)
For many years, Yaeger has worked with Dr. William R. Shankle, a neuroscientist whom The New York Times claimed proved the most "startling" discovery in neuroscience in the 1990s (that human beings aren't born with all the brain cells they die with), on a neuroscientific hypothesis about how neurotransmitters are generated and used. Yaeger credits much of his sensitivity to the subject (and its application to diet and health) to his work with creating optical images that change the brain's chemical composition from moment to moment through esthetic visual and aural phenomena.
As the noted, late pianist Samuel Lipman put it, "the Kaleidoplex infuses classical discipline into modern music and liberated autonomy into classical music."
