SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2019
VOLUME SEVEN NUMBER ONE
WADADA LEO SMITH
CINDY BLACKMAN
(March 23-29)
RUTH BROWN
(March 30-April 6)
JOHN LEWIS
(April 7-13)
JULIUS EASTMAN
(April 14-20)
PUBLIC ENEMY
(April 21-27)
WALLACE RONEY
(April 28-May 4)
MODERN JAZZ QUARTET
(May 5-11)
DE LA SOUL
(May 12-18)
KATHLEEN BATTLE
(May 19-25)
JULIA PERRY
(May 26-June 1)
HALE SMITH
(June 2-8)
BIG BOY CRUDUP
(June 9-15)Julius EASTMAN
Julius Eastman grew up in Ithaca, New York,
with his mother, Frances Eastman, and younger brother, Gerry. He began
studying piano at age 14 and made rapid progress. He studied at Ithaca College before transferring to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. There he studied piano with Mieczysław Horszowski and
composition with Constant Vauclain, and switched majors from piano to
composition. He made his debut as a pianist in 1966 at The Town Hall in New York City immediately
after graduating from Curtis. Eastman had a rich, deep, and extremely
flexible singing voice, for which he became noted for his 1973 Nonesuch recording of Eight Songs for a Mad King by the British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Eastman's talents gained the attention of composer-conductor Lukas Foss, who conducted Davies' music in performance at the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
At
the behest of Foss, Eastman joined the Creative Associates—a
"prestigious program in avant-garde classical music" that "carried a
stipend but no teaching obligations"—at SUNY Buffalo's Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. There he met Petr Kotik, a Czech-born
composer, conductor, and flutist. Eastman and Kotik performed together
extensively in the early to mid-1970s. Along with Kotik, Eastman was a
founding member of the S.E.M. Ensemble.
From
1971 he performed and toured with the group, and composed numerous
works for it. During this period, fifteen of Eastman's earliest works
were performed by the Creative Associates, including Stay On It (1973), an early augury of postminimalism and one of the first art music compositions inspired by progressions from popular music, presaging the later innovations of Russell and Rhys Chatham.
Although Eastman began to teach theory and composition courses over the
course of his tenure, he left Buffalo in 1975 following a
controversially ribald performance of John Cage's aleatoric Songbooks by the S.E.M. Ensemble (facilitated by Morton Feldman).
It included nudity and homoerotic allusions interpolated by Eastman,
during a visit from the elderly Cage. The latter was incensed and said
during an ensuing lecture that Eastman's "[ego]... is closed in on
homosexuality. And we know this because he has no other ideas."
Additionally, Eastman's friend Kyle Gann has
speculated that his inability to acclimate to the more bureaucratic
elements of academic life (including paperwork) may have hastened his
departure from the university.
Shortly thereafter, Eastman settled in New York City, where he initially straddled the divide between the conventionally bifurcated "uptown" and downtown music scenes.
Eastman often wrote his music following what he called an "organic"
principle. Each new section of a work contained all the information from
previous sections, though sometimes "the information is taken out at a
gradual and logical rate." The principle is most evident in his three
works for four pianos, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla, all from around 1979. The last of these appropriates Martin Luther's hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," as a gay manifesto. In 1976, Eastman participated in a performance of Eight Songs for a Mad King conducted by Pierre Boulez at Lincoln Center. He served as the first male vocalist in Meredith Monk's ensemble, as documented on her influential album Dolmen Music (1981). He fostered a strong kinship and collaboration with Arthur Russell, conducting nearly all of his orchestral recordings (compiled as First Thought Best Thought [Audika Records, 2006]) and participating (as organist and vocalist) in the recording of 24-24 Music(1982; released under the imprimatur of Dinosaur L), a controversial disco-influenced
composition that included the underground dance hits "Go Bang!" and "In
the Cornbelt"; both featured Eastman's trademark bravado.
During this period, he also played in a jazz ensemble with his brother Gerry (erstwhile guitarist of the Count Basie Orchestra). he also coordinated the Brooklyn Philharmonic's outreach-oriented Community Concert Series (performed by the CETA Orchestra funded by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts)
in conjunction with Foss and other composers of color. By 1980, he was
regularly touring across the United States and internationally; a
recording of a performance from that year at Northwestern University was released on the posthumous compilation Unjust Malaise (2005).
A 1981 piece for Eastman's voice and cello ensemble, The Holy Presence of Jeanne d'Arc, was performed at The Kitchen in New York City. In 1986, the choreographer Molissa Fenley set his dance, Geologic Moments, to Eastman's Thruway, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Despondent
about what he saw as a dearth of worthy professional opportunities,
Eastman grew increasingly dependent on drugs (including alcohol and
possibly crack cocaine) after 1983. His life fell apart; many of his
scores were impounded by the New York City Sheriff's Office following
an eviction in the early 1980s, further impeding his professional
development. While homeless, he briefly took refuge in Tompkins Square Park. A promised lectureship at Cornell University also failed to materialize during this period.
Despite a temporary attempt at a comeback, Eastman died alone at the age of 49 in Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, New York of cardiac arrest. No public notice was given to his death until an obituary by Kyle Gann appeared in the Village Voice;
it was dated January 22, 1991, eight months after Eastman died. As
Eastman's notational methods were loose and open to interpretation,
revival of his music has been a difficult task, dependent on people who
worked with him.
Red Bull Music Academy Daily
The
Red Bull Music Academy Daily is the online publication by the Red Bull
Music Academy, a global music institution committed to fostering
creativity in music. Just like the Academy, we think of it as a platform
for the essential ideas, sounds and people that have driven – and
continue to drive – our culture forward.
The Song Books Showdown of Julius Eastman and John Cage
Remembering an incendiary performance by the radical composer that shook up the avant-garde
It
was a cooler than usual evening on the SUNY at Buffalo campus on June
4th, 1975, when Julius Eastman – a charismatic, black, openly gay
composer – stepped forward. He was accompanied on the Baird Recital Hall
stage by a young white man and a young black woman, identified only as
Mr. Charles and Miss Suzyanna. Eastman looked around and introduced
himself.
“My name is Professor Padu,” he said in a dry, droll voice that sliced through the crowd’s laughter. “And I am here to teach you a new system of love.”
He continued, “There have been many systems of love
in the West which have been sort of degenerate, should we say. The first
system being the main system, the In-And-Out System, which I have now revised... to the Sideway-and-Sensitive System.” The audience roared.
Buffalo at the time was an improbable hotbed of the
American experimental music scene. “This conservative, provincial city
became a mecca for the avant-garde starting in 1962,” says Renée Levine
Packer, author of This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo,
“when the private University of Buffalo became the State University of
New York at Buffalo, and huge amounts of money were poured into creating
a ‘Berkeley of the West,’ vastly expanding the faculty and attracting
artists and intellectuals.” With funding from the Rockefeller
Foundation, composers Lukas Foss and Allen Sapp created the Center of
the Creative and Performing Arts to support young musicians of
exceptional talent with a bent for contemporary music, and the renowned
“Creative Associates” program incubated some of the most vital composers
and performers in the country, including the likes of Maryanne Amacher,
Terry Riley, George Crumb and Cornelius Cardew.
Julius Eastman, one such Creative Associate, was performing part of John Cage’s 1970 masterpiece Song Books – with Cage himself sitting in the audience – as a member of the experimental S.E.M. Ensemble. The Song Books
consist of 92 pieces, many of them koan-like instructions to the
performers that leave much to interpretation. A few overarching notes,
like “we connect Satie to Thoreau,” guide the enterprise. Eastman had
taken on “Solo for Voice No. 8,” which read in part: “In a situation
provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined
action, with any interruptions, fulfilling in whole, or in part, an
obligation to others.”
Eastman was transformed from insular scene hero into the mythic, inflammatory figure who challenged the foundations of the academy.
It
was clear from his first words that there would be a little juice
poured into Cage’s austere, Zen blend of indeterminacy and
transcendence-of-self. For some music historians, this was a night that
intersectionality and identity politics officially breached the
avant-garde: “Eastman’s performance that day may have constituted an
intersectional testing of the limits of his membership – or, in American
racial parlance, his ‘place’ – in the experimental scene,” writes
George E. Lewis, professor of American music at Columbia University, in
the essay collection Gay Guerilla: Julius Eastman and His Music.
Eastman was transformed from insular scene hero into the mythic,
inflammatory figure who challenged the foundations of the academy. He
would go on to write indelible works like “Gay Guerilla,” “N-----
Faggot,” “Crazy N-----” and “Evil N-----,” and even help pioneer post-disco in the Manhattan dance underground as a keyboardist and vocalist for Arthur Russell’s Dinosaur L collective.
Julius Eastman – Gay Guerrilla
Over
the next 14 minutes, Eastman delivered a bizarre lecture that focused
on the erotic, but played on and exploded notions about race,
colonialism and sexuality. As he invited the couple onstage with him to
strip – the man ended up naked, the woman only partially so due to
embarrassment – he declared them “the best specimens in the world.” Of
Miss Suzyanna he said, “She comes from a special tribe which is found
only in the Great Woods of Haiti.” Of Mr. Charles – blonde, almost
certainly one of Eastman’s boyfriends – he said, “I might congratulate
you in the audience who are from Buffalo, because Mr. Charles I found in
Buffalo, a very rare and wonderful specimen.”
Like an alien anthropologist, Eastman clinically
categorized the seductive elements and functions of their bodies, from
the way their “oval,” “slanted” eyes could drink in potential lovers
from the feet up, to the sensitive way the hand could stroke the breast.
He joked that he chose members of two races because he wanted “to show
the best of both worlds.” He referenced an imaginary work about foot
fetishism and castigated Americans for smacking their lips.
All the while, his voice growing more theatrical as
his fellow ensemble members began singing and playing eery electronics,
Eastman was camping things up, to the delight of the audience. He
wrapped his leg around his male “specimen” and puckered his mouth with
his fingers. “Julius only managed to get the man undressed,” recalled S.E.M. founder and director Petr Kotik,
“and being an outspoken homosexual, he was making all sorts of ‘achs!’
and ‘ahs’ as he was pulling his pants down.” A review by Jeff Simons in
the Buffalo Evening News said, “By the time Eastman’s little
performance was finished, Mr. Charles was completely undressed, and
Eastman’s leering, libidinous, lecture-performance had everyone
convulsed with the burlesque broadness of his homoerotic satire.”
In a final flip-off to convention, Eastman ended his
piece by saying, ”I am hoping, of course, that most of you will go home
and experiment, yes, because I know that you will like it as much as I
have. For those of you who would like to have a private lesson, you
write Box 202, La Jolla, California, care of Dr. Paga. Thank you so much
for listening to this marvelous lecture.”
For anyone familiar with Eastman at the time – a deeply driven composer and Grammy-nominated singer
who bridged downtown hipness with uptown tradition, and was an
incandescent presence on the Buffalo campus where he studied and taught –
the hijinks were of a piece with both his rebellious bent and firm
sense of self. Eastman was clear-eyed about the rarity of a black, gay
presence in the halls of musical academia, no matter how experimental it
claimed to be, and would go on to declare in a 1976 interview, “What I
am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the
fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”
Bringing radical blackness to the avant-garde music stage was still something very uncommon.
During
Eastman’s lecture, however, Kotik saw something was wrong. Amid the
crowd’s glee, John Cage watched the performance of his piece stonily,
even shouting something toward the end. Afterwards, Cage stalked onto
the stage and confronted Eastman and Kotik, demanding angrily, “What was
this? What was the meaning of this?” The next day at his lecture,
Cage was still furious. Normally soft-spoken and gentle, Cage pounded
his fists and said, “When you see that Julius Eastman from one
performance to the next, he does the same thing, harps on the same
thing, in other words does his thing and that his thing unfortunately
has become this one thing of sexuality.” He said of confronting Eastman
that Eastman told him he didn’t think he would perform the piece in the
future: “I said, ‘I’d be very grateful to you if you don’t.’”
Image © Albert Tercero
Why all the fuss, and why has the Song Books
incident become so notorious as a changing of the avant-garde? In one
sense, the moment was typical of most generational showdowns: A young,
iconoclastic upstart directly challenges an éminence grise to confront
new ideas and cultural currents or retire to the folds of history. It
was even a bit of an ambush: Eastman had performed the Song Books before, also with Cage present, without incident. The homoerotic lecturer swerve came out of nowhere.
What Eastman had displayed onstage wasn’t so very new. Hair,
with its exuberant nudity, had been playing on Broadway since 1968, gay
rights rebellion Stonewall took place in 1969, and many of the artistic
and musical happenings of the ’50s and ’60s contained more shocking
material. (What also wasn’t new, alas, was men making women feel
uncomfortable onstage as part of a performance.) So what had really
bothered Cage?
In his lecture, Cage acknowledged that Eastman’s
performance pointed out a limit of Cage’s own compositional technique.
In his instruction to “perform a disciplined action,” he said, he had
failed to make his true intentions known. “You can’t do whatever you
want, but anything goes,” Cage said, banging a nearby piano, typically
enigmatic. “By discipline, I understand something that will act as a
yoke, or yoga, to the ego, keeping the ego from getting bigger, so that
its boundaries will dissolve and you will be free of its likes and
dislikes. I don’t approve because the ego of Julius Eastman is closed in
on the subject of homosexuality. And we know this because he has no
other idea to express. In a Zen situation where his mind might open up
and flow with something beyond his imagination, he doesn’t know the
first step to take.”
“This was a very interesting thing for Cage to say,”
says Adam Overton, an LA-based musician and composer who studied Cage
and was instrumental in re-transcribing and posting Cage’s lecture and
Eastman’s performance online. Overton’s artist collective, the Bureau of
Experimental Speech and Holy Theses, organized a series of performative
lectures in 2012 using Eastman’s own as a jumping-off point. “In one
sense, what Cage is saying overall is a relief. There are limitations to
indeterminacy. You can’t just jump up and play a zydeco number in the
middle of a Cage piece. There must be rigor and thoughtfulness that fits
the conditions.
“But in another, it feels like Cage may not have
taken the full implications of what Eastman was doing into account,”
Overton continues. “In the beginning of Song Books and in the
lecture, Cage emphasizes that he wanted performers to ‘connect Satie
with Thoreau.’ Cage says that ‘neither Satie nor Thoreau is known to
have had any sexual connection with anyone or anything.’ Now, Eastman
may have looked at that instruction and giggled, because he may have
felt that’s not the whole story with those two. I wonder if Eastman may
have been playing his homosexuality itself as an instrument during the
lecture, ultimately realizing Cage’s intent, although Cage himself
didn’t recognize it.”
Julius was a post-minimalist even before minimalism really took hold.
Cage
and Eastman were both gay men, but of very different backgrounds.
Eastman, a child prodigy born in Ithaca, New York, in 1940, wore his
sexuality on his sleeve. “When I first met Julius, he breezed in to a
rehearsal at 10 AM, dressed in black leather and chains, and drinking
scotch,” composer Mary Jane Leach, who encountered Eastman in New York
City, says. He was unabashed in his joyful lust: In Gay Guerilla: Julius Eastman and his Music,
edited by Packer and Leach, Eastman’s one-time lover R. Nemo Hill
remembers attending an impromptu orgy in Manhattan’s 125th Street subway
station in 1981 that was busted by a cop. “Where the hell do you think
you’re going?” Eastman demanded of Hill as he fled with the other men.
“Come back here and face it like a man!” The cop was so taken aback by
this fearlessness he merely issued a reprimand. After a couple drinks at
a bar down the street, Eastman convinced Hill to hit the same restroom
and resume with a new set of partners.
Cage came from a more discreet period. “There was a
time, you may remember, when privacy was a societal value,” says Packer,
who became a friend of Eastman when she worked at SUNY at Buffalo.
“People did not talk about their money or how much their house cost.
Religion was a private affair, as was a person’s sexuality.” Cage came
from this time and kept things to himself; many artists of his
generation, like Jackson Pollock, were openly homophobic to the point
where Cage avoided them, and he once coyly described his longtime
relationship with the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham as, “I
cook and Merce does the dishes.” The insertion of sexual identity into
Cage’s work, when Cage’s aesthetic often aimed toward an obliteration
of the self (perhaps a survival technique during highly repressive
times), was an open provocation.
Still, Eastman’s incitements may have had less to do
with politics at that time than his restless spirit. “I don’t believe
that Julius set out to be confrontational with John Cage, but that’s
definitely the way it turned out,” Packer says. “Julius was irreverent
and that was certainly part of his charm. He was naughty, didn’t pay
much attention to conventions, rules, and hierarchies. Money meant
little to him. Sometimes he was careless.” Cage’s own interrogation of
Eastman after the performance support this. “He told me that through
performing the work too many times he’s become bored with it,” Cage said
during his fiery lecture. “I said, ‘If you’re bored with it, why do you
do it?’”
Bringing radical blackness to the avant-garde music
stage, however, was still something very uncommon. “When I met Julius in
1968, and at least until the early ’70s, he was not a civil rights or
gay rights activist,” said Packer. “My own theory is that he became more
politically active after the 1971 Attica uprising.” (Attica is very
close to Buffalo and the events at the prison were closely covered in
the press and on the university campus). There were woefully few black
composers on the new music scene even in the 1970s: “I was a kind of
talented freak who occasionally injected some vitality into
programming,” Eastman said of his eventual frustrations with the
Creative Associates. The continued segregation of black experimental
musicians into jazz was something Eastman himself attempted to comment
on and overcome through his compositions. His method, in pieces like
1973’s peppy “Stay On It,” infused the repetitious figures that were
becoming more fashionable – chic downtown New York minimalism was
replacing the expansive transcendentalism of Cage’s generation – with
pop culture allusions and sweeping moments of improvisation.
Julius Eastman – Stay On It (Live at the 2016 Switchboard Music Festival)
“Julius
was a post-minimalist even before minimalism really took hold,” says
Leach, a composer who took on the herculean task of tracking down
existing Eastman scores and recorded performances for a 2005
retrospective CD set, Unjust Malaise. “These guys like Philip Glass and Steve Reich
were writing this repetitive music that was so anal in a way – you had
to get everything just right; one note off and the whole thing would
fall apart. With Julius, he was based in repetition, but here was a
spirit of openness and improvisation. His scores, if they were written
out that way, were often like jazz scores. He loved multiplying
instruments – four pianos, ten cellos – so there was a real feeling of
the presence of the instrument, not just using an instrument in some
kind of equation, as a means to an end.”
Eastman’s emotional, performer-focused,
quasi-minimalist sound served him well when he finally tired of the
white hierarchies of the academy and famously kicked directly against
them, in a series of pieces composed around 1979. With their defiant
titles – “Crazy N-----,” “Evil N-----,” “Gay Guerilla” – they signalled a
more militant phase of Eastman’s thought, although compositionally they
were rife with roiling beauty: “Gay Guerilla” even contains a
full-throated riff on the hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” When the
pieces were played in a program at Northwestern University, an outcry
caused their names to be withheld from the program, but Eastman was
allowed to address the crowd before the performance.
“What I mean by ‘n-----s’ is that thing which is fundamental,” he said,
“that person or thing that obtains a basicness, a fundamentalness, and
eschews that thing which is superficial or, what can we say, elegant.
There are 99 names of Allah, and there are 52 n-----s.” This explicit,
prophetic voice is a long way from the coy Professor Padu of Solo for
Voice No. 8.
Eastman went to great lengths for his art, or, in
Hill’s words, “shedding the burden of talent... in order to test it,
subjecting it to a series of tortures in order to purify its coin of all
counterfeit.” A well-known story tells of him giving pedicures to men
at a downtown shelter while composing “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t
You Rich?” In 1981, he toured with Meredith Monk
as a singer, and productions of his music were still being debuted and
toured in Europe. But his confrontational nature and disregard for
convention were sinking friendships, torpedoing potential jobs and
melting away his financial ties. “No detail was too small to elicit the
symbolic act of resistance; no taboo was too tiny to be broken,” Hill
says. According to music critic Kyle Gann, writing in Gay Guerilla,
“in 1983 a hoped-for job teaching at Cornell failed to materialize, and
his life started falling apart. He drank heavily and smoked crack.”
Eastman’s last job was at Tower Records, before he was overtaken by
mental illness and addiction. He lost most of his scores when he was
evicted from his apartment, and wandered homeless through the streets of
the Lower East Side of Manhattan. (His friends rescued scraps of scores
and snippets of recordings whenever they could: In one case, the
10-cello score for his “The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc” was found being used to line a litter box.)
He died in 1990, alone back in Buffalo, officially
of cardiac arrest, although Gann and others suspect AIDS and exhaustion
brought on his collapse. His passing was only marked months later in a Village Voice obituary by Gann, who was by then one of the few people still looking for him. In the past decade, largely due to Leach’s advocacy and determination, Eastman has been re-discovered, his music retouched by Jace Clayton,
AKA DJ/Rupture, re-released by the Frozen Reeds label and increasingly
performed and written about. He’s become a symbol of intersectionality –
although it’s an identity he might have rejected. And the Song Books
incident has been enshrined in the mythology of American music, despite
Cage’s words back then: “Admittedly, Julius Eastman performs
beautifully – and if it were not for the fact that the performance was
connected with my work, I could easily find it enjoyable. Or as my
father used to tell me, ‘Don’t give it a thought. Ten years later you
won’t remember it.
http://www.artnews.com/2018/02/07/speak-boldly-question-kitchen-moving-multifarious-tribute-composer-julius-eastman/
Art of the City
‘Speak Boldly When They Question You’: At the Kitchen, a Moving and Multifarious Tribute to Composer Julius Eastman
A performance of Julius Eastman’s Crazy Nigger (1979) at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, on January 28. THE KITCHEN
It is not even the second week of February, but the Kitchen’s festival for the late, great composer Julius Eastman, “That Which Is Fundamental,” has already firmly secured a spot as one of highlights of 2018 in New York. A string of exhilarating performances, all sold out, have concluded, but a treasure box of an exhibition of Eastman’s archival materials remains on view through this Saturday at the Chelsea alternative space alongside a moving show, inspired by the artist’s work, of contemporary art, including pieces by Sondra Perry, Carolyn Lazard, and Chloë Bass. Recordings of the long-neglected musician’s work have trickled online, and there are records available, too, plus a book. If you are not yet a fan of Eastman, who died in 1990, at the age of 49, now is the time to become one.
Many of Eastman’s compositions are ingenious studies in repetition and endurance, plumbing the effects they can generate on a spectrum ranging from the sublime to the monstrous. His works churn and metamorphose slowly—and sometimes violently. His compositions are about how minute ideas and groups of individual players can clash and battle, then come together and yield outside returns. In this way, they have links to contemporaneous creations like the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, the hand-fashioned nets of Eva Hesse, the blurred abstract paintings of Jack Whitten, David Diao, and Gerhard Richter, and the “Wave” paintings of Lee Lozano. These are all works in which thrilling surprises emerge from relentless repetition. They gallantly engage with chance and improvisation in ways that can evince vulnerability and trauma.
At the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, on January 28, four players, each at their own piano, hit the keys rapid-fire, building waves of sound as they traded a recurring motif amongst themselves. This was the 1979 work Evil Nigger (1979), and it was, at most moments, amazingly formidable: pure power resounded through that huge warehouse space. But then it would turn precarious, even fragile, as the pianos went in disparate, dissonant directions. When that happened, Joseph Kubera, one of the four players, would shout “1–2–3–4!,” then he and the others—Dynasty Battles, Michelle Cann, and Adam Tender—would be at it again, united, charging deeper into the piece, like a metal version of Flight of the Bumblebee improbably written for piano. The audience, sitting on all four sides of the musicians, rewarded their virtuosic 20-minute performance with thunderous applause.
On February 3, at the Kitchen, ten cellists sliced away at The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (1981), a gorgeous melody working its way through a wall of notes, and Trumpet (1970),
for which seven players on that instrument squealed in the cacophonous
and majestic manner of a good, functioning democracy before retreating
to an unlikely peace.
Eastman
THE KITCHEN
Eastman was raised in
Ithaca, New York, and “one of the foundations of our family was that
everybody had a piano—all of our grandparents had pianos, there was a
piano in my house when I grew up,” his older brother, Gerry Eastman,
told the Kitchen on January 27, before performing an improvisation in
honor of Julius on guitar with his quartet. “My mother bought my brother
a seven-foot grand piano, which I still have in my loft today, when she
found out he had some talent.” He listened to Julius play throughout
their youth, and, he said, “I never heard a piano player that sounded
better than him.”
The tragic stretches of Julius’s life and work have been
regularly repeated in stories about his posthumous revival, Gerry said.
Many of his scores have been lost. Some others survive only partially,
and a few works in the festival, which was organized by Tiona Nekkia
McClodden and Dustin Hurt, of Bowerbird, the Philadelphia organization
that presented the it last year, were reconstructed by admirers. Late in
his life, he may have been mentally ill and was homeless for a period.
But people should also know, Gerry said, that his brother
could be the life of the party. During the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s in
Buffalo (where he settled after attending Curtis in Philadelphia), New
York (he performed at the Kitchen), and abroad, he was a key member of
the vanguard music community. In a line that is often quoted, Julius
once said, “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the
fullest—Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a
homosexual to the fullest.” He composed, collaborated, and performed
feverishly, and earned a Grammy nomination for his singing.
And some of the festival’s most touching moments came with the performance of Eastman’s vocal works. For Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, Julian Terrell Otis performed a capella, with high drama, as he teased nuance out of just a few lines: “Saint Michael said/Saint Margaret said/Saint Catherine said/They said/He said/She said/Joan/Speak Boldly/When they question you.”
Macle (1971) made use of four singers, all from the
group Ekmeles, who let out quick yelps, quacks, and coughs, told
stories, and performed bits of songs they had selected—“Amazing Grace,”
Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” the Beach Boys’s “Don’t Talk,” and Jamila
Wood’s chorus on Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s “Sunday
Candy”: “You gotta move it slowly/Take and eat my body like it’s holy.”
They overlapped their parts, then went quiet, giving each other space to
be heard. Before long they were saying, with varying forms of
intonation and inflection: “TAKE HEART, TAKE”—a long pause”—“HEART. TAKE. HEART! TAKE HEART!” They ran into the audience shouting it, and then sprinted out of the room, slamming doors behind them.
Take heart. Keep pushing. Keep going. That is the message
and the conviction that Eastman’s work radiates, in ways both
ultra-sincere and playfully ironic. In Fememine (1974) at the
Kitchen on January 25, an almost brutally loud pair of mechanically
controlled sleigh bells laid down a bed of thick white noise that a
repeating vibraphone worked to break through. A piano provided quiet
chords. Flute, bassoon, trombone, and keyboard glided in. It went on for
more than an hour, building ever so gradually, with the piano’s chords
becoming more extroverted, almost rhapsodic. You couldn’t believe it
could get bigger, you couldn’t believe it hadn’t ended, you didn’t want
it to end.
Julius Eastman’s Femenine (1974) being performed at the Kitchen on January 25 with the S.E.M. Ensemble. THE KITCHEN
On that frigid Sunday night at the Knockdown Center, four pianists closed the evening with Crazy Nigger
(1979), the high point in a festival that had no shortage of them. It
began with insistent, urgent jabs on the piano, order that threatened to
spill into chaos. At points, all four players were hammering notes,
crescendoing gradually, letting loose cascades of sound that were
obliquely romantic and almost unearthly in their density. Near the end,
they slowed and fell away. A single player let loose huge, deep notes,
which rang through the brick space like the tintinnabulation of a giant
bell being struck at a glorious ceremony.
Nine additional people got up from their seats in the
crowd and stood behind various players, reaching down to the piano,
joining in. The tempo, set by the lowest rings, was deliberate as the
other players struck keys, making it sound like the loudest harp in the
world was ringing in a cavernous cathedral—it was celestial music,
speaking boldly, with nothing held back.
https://www.musicworks.ca/reviews/recordings/kukuruz-quartet-julius-eastman%E2%80%94piano-interpretations
Kukuruz Quartet. Julius Eastman—Piano Interpretations
Intakt Records, Intakt CD 306.
One outcome of the streaming era—not a necessary one, but a likely
one—is the devaluation of liner notes. It’s not that they don’t exist;
for example, George Lewis’s excellent notes to this collection of Julius
Eastman piano works by the Kukuruz Quartet appear both in the CD
booklet and as a PDF with the download version. But they should be
recognized and treated as the scholarship they sometimes are, and not
left by the wayside when digital files make their way along the stream
to other paid (and illicit) streaming services. That’s because
Lewis—himself, of course, a musician, composer, academic, and
author—frames so precisely in his essay what is so important about the
four compositions performed here by the four pianists of the Kukuruz
Quartet.
More than a quarter century after his demise, Eastman (who faced
homelessness and drug addiction during his latter years, and was all but
unknown when he died at age forty-nine in 1990) has become something of
a new-music cause célèbre in recent years. He was the subject of a
concert and gallery retrospective at the Kitchen in New York City, a
venue where he had performed in a city where he had lived, and his
spirited New York minimalism has been recorded anew and included in
concert and festival programs around the world. The Kukuruz Quartet
album is a worthy addition to the groundswell. They don’t shy away from
the profound descending theme of Evil Nigger and they find the fragility in Gay Guerrilla
(both composed in 1979). At twenty-one and thirty minutes respectively,
those two compositions dominate the disc. The program is rounded out by
a pair of less frequently heard works, the tilting and swaying Fugue No. 7 (1983) and the nearly translucent Buddha (1984).
Eastman had a penchant for composing for ensembles of like instruments,
and his work for multiple pianos is his strongest. The Swiss pianists
might not have a wealth of material for their ensemble, but they embrace
and inhabit Eastman’s work with full commitment.
In his liner notes, Lewis compares the collective forgetting of
Eastman’s work to that of another African American composer, Julia
Perry, who died eleven years earlier than he and is still awaiting her
own rediscovery. Lewis writes that composer, bassist, and visual artist
Benjamin Patterson has until recently also been left out of the
histories. There are other examples, and Lewis provides them.
This perhaps wilful forgetting, Lewis suggests, is the result of persistent framing of the avant-garde as an extension of European (read: white) artistic traditions. Eastman—a gay American of African decent—seems, even feels, to have been plenty aware of his cultural confinement. His titling of works (his portfolio also includes Nigger Faggot, Crazy Nigger, Dirty Nigger and If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?) is confrontational, even aggressive, while the works themselves are sometimes meditative, sometimes intellectually stimulating. Eastman isn’t challenging us to forget him, though, so much as he’s saying that he knows we will. It’s our job to prove him wrong, so that future generations see a late twentieth-century minimalism that doesn’t only have the complexion of Cage and Feldman. Kukuruz has done much to help stave off that near certainty. And so long as his text isn’t left along the edge of the information superhighway, Lewis has done so as well.
https://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/david_patrick_stearns/julius-eastman-is-celebrated-fundamentally-20170508.html
The unfinished genius of Julius Eastman
Composer Julius Eastman (1940-90) is not having an easy resurrection. But was anything about him ever easy?
His best pieces are acclaimed — though they have provocative, unprintable titles.
Surviving
scores have significant information gaps. Like how they fit together.
Or what they were titled. Or if they were ever performed.
"As
Julius' profile starts to emerge again with articles in the New Yorker
and the New York Times, more people are saying, `Oh, yeah, I knew that
guy. He did a concert in our space,' " said Dustin Hurt, whose
Bowerbird-produced concerts are a significant force in the Eastman
revival, starting with a 2015 program of his music and now with the
"That Which is Fundamental" festival.
"Black, openly gay, virtuosic, and arrogant" was how Eastman was described Friday by his younger brother Gerry at the festival opening. It was a magnetic combination in cutting-edge circles, but less welcome in the rest of the world.
Born
in Ithaca, N.Y., educated at the Curtis Institute, Eastman migrated
from one artistic hotbed to another, from the faculty of the University
of Buffalo when it was a new-music crucible in the 1970s to the downtown
Manhattan minimalist circles in the 1980s. His compositions were
performed at fashionable venues, such as the Kitchen, and his famously
exclamatory vocal performance in Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King was heard at the New York Philharmonic.
It was a wild time. Mary Jane Leach worked alongside him as a vocalist during that period in 1981: "At 10 a.m., Julius breezed in, dressed in black leather and chains, drinking Scotch," she wrote in an album note for an Eastman recording. "That was my introduction to the outrageousness that was Julius Eastman, who strove to push his identities as a gay black man and musician to the fullest."
Only
a few years later, having fallen afoul of addiction, he lost his scores
and papers in a New York apartment eviction and, living homeless, was
so off the grid that when Meredith Monk wanted him to sing on one of her
albums, the Lower East Side had to be plastered with fliers imploring
Eastman to call. Then at age 49, he made his way back to Buffalo, where
he died.
Eastman's revival began around 2005, with the release of the three-CD set Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise, on the New World label. Hurt discovered Eastman only several years ago, around the time of Gay Guerrilla,
a collection of essays about Eastman edited by Leach and Renee Levine
Packer (University of Rochester Press). At that time, barely a single
concert of Eastman music could be assembled. Now, Hurt estimates that
of Eastman's 50 or so works, 15 are lost. One piece, titled That Boy,
survives in a single page of incomprehensible score. Most enigmatic is
an untitled choral work that turned up months ago, written for the
largest ensembles of his career. It appears to have been performed, but
nobody yet knows where or when.
Scholars
of centuries-old music are used to exhaustively piecing together enough
evidence to yield a performance. Though Eastman's world is more
chronologically recent, it's also strangely distant. Gerry Eastman had
some scores. A blue suitcase owned by his late mother, Frances, yielded
others. Hurt has spent days leafing through endless newspaper clippings
in Buffalo, yielding a clue here and there that makes another piece fall
into place. Friday's performance of Femenine, for example.
His story is that of an unfinished symphony. You don't have the luxury of understanding what's there from the perspective of where it led. Hurt readily refers to Eastman as a creative genius. But will the full range of that genius ever be heard?
Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental continues May 12, 19 and 26 at The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St. Tickets: $12-$25.
Information:267-231-9813.www.ThatWhichIsFundamental.com. Exhibition through May 28 at Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., noon-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, free.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
https://www.indiewire.com/2014/05/consider-the-mysterious-life-death-of-african-american-composer-pianist-julius-eastman-for-your-next-film-project-235661/
Art
SHARJAH, UAE — “There are of course 99 names of Allah, but there are 52 niggers. So therefore, I will be playing two of these niggers.” This is what Julius Eastman said during his introduction to the Northwestern University audience at a concert in June of 1980, and it is repeated in the Otolith Group‘s piece “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017), presented at this year’s Sharjah Biennial.
During the video, that lasts 50 minutes, two performers (a black man, Dante Micheaux, and a black woman, Elaine Mitchener) recite the entire statement. It is a riveting recitation by both actors, whose deliveries are very different. Micheaux, who performs at the beginning of the video, is calm and matter of fact in his approach, while Mitchener at certain points wails, as if begging the audience to hear and understand the import of what she says. After the actors’ declamation the pianists play — four pianists at two pianos bring “Evil Nigger,” “Gay Guerrilla,” and “Crazy Nigger,” to life. The appearance of the four pianists provide an odd visual contrast: they are all white and their faces are marked with abstract shapes contrived with silver makeup. The combination of the extraordinary visuals and the minimalist music of Eastman — an avant-garde, black, gay composer of music that sounds otherwordly — keeps me in my seat with no sense of time passing.
The Otolith Group “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017) (still) HD video, 50 minutes 
The Otolith Group “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017) (still) HD video, 50 minutes 
The Otolith Group “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017) (still) HD video, 50 minutes
Joy Boy by Julius Eastman& Unearthed by Frozen Reeds in 2017, this recording of Eastman’s queer-themed Joy Boy was performed by the S.E.M. ensemble, at the same concert as his well sought out Femenine. The piece consists of staccato reed and a vocal quartet that work together, in ways that are simultaneously obtuse and harmonious. The voices are strange and unwavering, further complimented by an incidental noise from shuffling audience members and chesty coughs. The naked tempestuousness of this piece can give the listener the illusion of knowing more about Eastman than is actually possible. The piece is so riddled with imperfection yet in total somehow it translates to the polar opposite. A demonstration of just how rash the human voice can be.
Julius Eastman - Femenine (1974)
This 2016 release of a 1974 Eastman performance offers a completely new perspective on his body of work. Femenine is one of a select few ways by which you can actually experience Eastman as a performer. According to many he’d always been an eccentric presence. In one instance Mary Jane Leach described him as having turned up to a choir performance dressed in leather and chains. His overt queerness, pushed Eastman away from the strictly hetero world of classical. Even the quietly queer John Cage was said to be repulsed by explicit, homoerotic reframing of his own Song Books by S.E.M. Ensemble, during which Eastman stripped male singers naked on stage.
The title of Femenine, is the first overt reference Eastman makes to gender nonconformity. While a reference to the reality of being effeminate in 70s New York is bold in itself, the piece yields something just as subversive.
In many ways it is a sister composition not only to Masculine but to Stay On It too. It shares the same buoyant vibrancy and general infectiousness. Beginning with machine controlled sleigh bells that perpetuate through the 72 minute duration, Femmine is testament to both Eastman’s sense of humour and derision of his contemporaries. This machine programmed instrument almost seems to satirise the almost industrial performance that can turn many off from the contemporary classical music of that time.
Julius Eastman - Evil N*gger (1979)
This is a part of a self-titled series, which were a collection of pieces written in the late 70s and early 80s. The pieces, and this one in particular, characterises the identity politics of his music. It’s a challenge not only to the musical politics of New York’s avant-garde, which is often documented as bigoted but also a challenge to its social politics. And Evil N*gger is one of Eastman’s loudest statements. Not only a reclamation of the slur in its title, it is formally bold and provocative with an integrally defiant and restless energy. This power is created through an evocative dark piano composition and is profoundly epic in the most acute way possible. Minimalism is often accused of being devoid of passion and emotion but this is not something that can be levelled at the work of Eastman.
Julius Eastman- Gay Guerrilla (1980)
The worlds of contemporary classical and (for the most part) the avant-garde in the 70s and 80s, weren't the most accommodating of scenes for the person of colour or the queer alike. The miasmic entrenchment of the classical and traditional rung true then, just as many say it does it does now. As the militant queer dichotomy Gay Guerrilla is combative of this, and it is far from timid in what it’s trying to say.
Beginning in lonely stuttering notes, slowly unraveling into defiant crescendos, before the final part repurposes Martin Luther’s A Mighty Fortress Is Our God into a queer manifesto. Gay Guerrilla exposes the very best aspects of Eastman as a composer and social commentator. And while racial and sexual politics inform Eastman’s work greatly, they certainly don’t define them. He expresses feeling in its coldest and most naked form. Understanding this begins with the acknowledgment that Eastman is a black gay man. Gay Guerilla is one of the most moving pieces ever to be written for eight hands. Propulsive – it’s a bombastic tragedy, and a deeply saddening one.
Meredith Monk-Dolmen Music (1981)
Luminaries to one another, the artistic connection between Eastman and Meredith Monk was long and meaningful. While Eastman provides the foreboding organ on the opener to what many consider Monk’s opus Turtle Dreams, his monastic vocals on Dolmen Music’s final piece is their greatest collaboration. Monk’s explorations of human vocal texture enamoured Eastman more than that of any other contemporary composer. And when you look at what he tries to achieve with his own music, the connection becomes quite obvious.
Dolmen Music traverses the complexities of the masculine and the feminine through means of voice. And the climax of this record sees them combine forces harmoniously. While it would certainly be a stretch to call Eastman a gender abolitionist, with the little information we actually have about him, his work does seem intent on destroying binaries as much as possible.
Dolmen Music was later sampled by DJ Shadow on Endtroducing thus forging a tenuous bridge between Eastman and the mainstream.
Dinosaur L - 24→24 Music (1981)
Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell are not too dissimilar. It’s easy to categorise both as under-appreciated queer icons who died way too early. Both were never credited with the acclaim they deserved. Their music can be something of a hotspot for queer tourist record collectors alike. What better way to support the cause then buying into Russell who died of AIDS in 1992? That’s not to discredit straight people who love Arthur Russell - his music is about much more than being gay - but records like World Of Echo in particular will always be a sacred part of queer musical history. And revisionist history can often leave that aspect out thus erasing queer narratives.
If Arthur Russell’s lyrics encapsulate being gay in the 80s then Eastman’s instrumentals score it. Julius Eastman conducted a large amount of Russell’s orchestral recordings , but their most notable convergence comes in the world of disco arguably one of the first genre subcultures to be a somewhat LGBT safe space.
Eastman plays organ and provides baritone backing on Dinosaur L’s 24→24 Music, which is probably the biggest floor filling record for Eastman, if not Russell. At times awkwardly programmed beats, cartoonish vocals, a no wave aesthetic and lyrics like “You’re gonna be clean on your bean”, make it hard to understand. 24→24 Music is the weirdest outlier in Eastman’s Career.
Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner (2013)
One aspect of Eastman’s personality that’s often underestimated is his sense of humour. Even though he wasn't shy of tackling grave issues this wasn't a constant thing for him. In the excellent documentary Without A Net Renee Levine Packer describes him as “very funny but also very serious. Very serious and grave at his core even though he’d assume [resemblance] of someone who was very relaxed.” The Jace Clayton 2013 live tribute to Eastman is testament to this. As well as performing many of his pieces the show envisages a world in which Julius Eastman is a coffee table composer and household name through vignette and parody. In one instance Clayton Skype interviews Arooj Aftab for the role of Julius Eastman Impersonator.
Kukuruz Quartet - Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations (2018)
Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations by Kukuruz Quartet
The new and justified resurgence in interest in Eastman’s music over the past few years has meant that reinterpretations of his work have become an inevitability. Kurukuz Quartet connect themselves with Eastman in 2014 where they performed his music to standing ovations in Athens. Last year the Zürich ensemble rendered four of Eastman’s finest piano pieces for CD release. Fugue no. 7, Evil N*gger, Buddha and Gay Guerrilla.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/02/05/julius-eastman-music
Rehearsal of Julius Eastman’s piece "Trumpet" at Buffalo Unitarian Church in 1972.
(Ron Hammond)
(PHOTO: Julius Eastman by Ron Hammond)
Julius Eastman:
Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental
is an interdisciplinary, multi-artist project that examines the life,
work, and resurgent influence of Julius Eastman, a gay African American
composer and performer who was active internationally in the 1970s and
80s, but who died homeless at the age of 49, leaving an incomplete but
compelling collection of scores and recordings. The culmination of more
than three years of research, this first iteration of this project will
take place in Philadelphia in May 2017. Events include four major
concerts - including several modern “premieres” of recently recovered
works - and a multi-disciplinary exhibition featuring archival materials
and work by ten contemporary artists who engage with Eastman and the
fragmented nature of his legacy.
That Which Is Fundamental is the first comprehensive examination of Eastman's legacy to work alongside the Eastman Estate, an organization led by Gerry Eastman to gather together, organize, preserve, disseminate, and generally further the work of his brother, Julius.
Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental is a project of Bowerbird, a Philadelphia based non profit dedicated to presenting experimental music and related art forms. For more info visit: www.bowerbird.org
listen to julius eastman
julius eastman: experimental intermedia excerpt
In his article The Composer as Weakling, Julius Eastman (1940-90) wrote about “the poor relationship between composer and instrumentalist, and the puny state of the contemporary composer in the classical music world. If we make a survey of classical music programming or look at the curriculum and attitudes in our conservatories, we would be led to believe that today’s instrumentalist lacks imagination, scholarship, a modicum of curiosity; or we would be led to believe that music was born in 1700, lived a full life until 1850 at which time music caught an incurable disease and finally died in 1900.” 1
Eastman certainly didn’t lack scholarship, having graduated from the Curtis Institute with a degree in composition. And he most certainly did not lack imagination or curiosity. He was both a composer and a gifted vocalist and pianist. In addition to his own compositions, he performed a wide variety of music. Best known for his performance of Peter Maxwell-Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, one of the most demanding vocal parts in twentieth-century music, he also performed music from all periods, from Bach to Haydn to Richard Strauss to [Gian Carlo] Menotti and [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, often under the baton of famous conductors such as Lukas Foss, Pierre Boulez, and Zubin Mehta. He was also familiar with jazz and improvisation, at times performing with his brother Gerry, a bassist with the Count Basie Band, among other groups. His compositions evince the culmination of the wide variety of music that he was exposed to, creating music that is indisputably and uniquely his own.
Writing authoritatively about Eastman is somewhat precarious, as much of his work, both scores and recordings, were lost when he was evicted from his East Village apartment in New York City in 1983 or 84. The sheriff had dumped his possessions onto the street, with Eastman making no effort to recover any of his music. Various friends, upon hearing this, tried to salvage as much as they could, but most was lost. So inferences have to be drawn from the few scores and recordings that do exist, coupled with concert reviews and recollections of people involved in these events, some of which contradict each other.
He moved to New York in 1976 and I have a feeling that, once he left Buffalo, he didn't have access to the same kind of ready group of musicians to perform his work. So, he began to create pieces that he could perform solo, either on piano or as a vocalist. He had two solo concerts in New York that year: one at Environ, Praise God From Whom All Devils Grow, which was reviewed, and another at Experimental Intermedia Foundation, for which there was a recording. Both concerts were improvisational in nature.
In his review of the Environ concert, Tom Johnson noted that “There are probably more composers-performers today than ever before. Many composers have had traditional performing skills, but people like Paganini and Rachmaninoff, whose music really depended on their performance abilities, have been rare….But of course, there are also purely artistic reasons why musicians sometimes prefer to write for themselves instead of for other performers. In some cases composers really seem to find themselves once they begin looking inside their own voices and instruments, and come up with strong personal statements that never quite came through as long as the were creating music for others to play.” He went on to note that Eastman played piano in a “high-energy, free-jazz style,” and sang in a “crazed baritone.” 2 Joseph Horowitz also noted that the singing was “often demonic.” 3 It seems that he usually didn’t combine voice and piano in these concerts, and that his piano playing tended more towards free jazz, while his vocal solos were more minimal and in the style of Avant-Garde classical music.
Listening to his Experimental Intermedia concert, which was primarily solo voice, the singing was fairly ornate and melismatic. At times it even seemed medieval, especially Spanish medieval music, with rhythms being tapped out in that style. Although he had used extended vocal techniques in earlier pieces, such as Macle, written in 1971, this singing is fairly straightforward.
His use of text in the Experimental Intermedia concert, source unknown, is very interesting and reminiscent of Gertrude Stein. For the first 2:20, only four words are sung “To know the difference,” usually in groups of one or two words. Gradually, words are added, usually one at a time, so that by 4:42 sixteen words are being sung in various combinations “To know the difference between the one without another. But he is the one behind the zero. To know the difference between the one and the zero.” By 6:28 twenty-four words are being sung, adding: “Be known to you and to me that the one is after zero and his place is one. His place is behind the zero. His name is one.”
The work of Gertrude Stein was very well known in the circles that Eastman was part of. She wrote in a repetitive style, using a limited vocabulary, as in the example below.
He had been nicely faithful. In being one he was one who had he been one continuing would not have been one continuing being nicely faithful. He was one continuing, he was not continuing to be nicely faithful. In continuing he was being one being the one who was saying good good, excellent but in continuing he was needing that he was believing that he was aspiring to be one continuing to be able to be saying good good, excellent. He had been one saying good good, excellent. He had been that one. 4
Eastman had worked with Petr Kotik in the SEM Ensemble from 1969-75. Kotik wrote Many, Many Women, using text by Stein, and which Eastman performed in at various stages of its development. He also had met and performed with Virgil Thomson, who had written two operas using texts by Stein. And, one of his close collaborators, the choreographer Andrew deGroat, for whom Eastman wrote The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (Joan), was a big fan of Stein. Besides having their use of repetition in common, Stein was searching for the “bottom nature” 5 of her characters, while Eastman was searching for “that which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness.” 6 They were both gay.
Eastman’s Praise God From Whom All Devils Grow concert at Environ, which made a profane interpretation of the hymn Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow, is his first instance of an overt reference to a religious text, although in a transgressive way. On the other hand, his Experimental Intermedia concert, while it had no overt religious references, juxtaposed super-8 film showing dog shit and close-ups of a drag queen, displaying in your face sexuality and depravity.
By 1978 Eastman, who was black and flamboyantly gay, was composing pieces that were part of a “Nigger” series of works, Nigger Faggot (NF) and Dirty Nigger, both for chamber ensemble, as well as Crazy Nigger, for multiples of one instrument, but usually performed on pianos. It was the first of a trio of pieces usually performed on four pianos. The other two pieces, Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla, were written in 1979. Although their titles are provocative, the music isn’t, and they are probably the pieces that sealed Eastman’s reputation as an excellent composer.
So there was this duality going on in Eastman’s work – provocative titles, texts, and multi-media paired with ecstatic music. Gradually actual religious texts began to be used by Eastman, and at least by spring of 1980 he was improvising using religious texts, with titles such as Humanity and the Four Books of Confucious. He was a spiritual person and used texts from many religions.
In 1981 he wrote Joan, scored for ten cellos, that was paired with de Groat’s dance Gravy, which was presented at The Kitchen in New York. It is a vital, through-written, and dense piece full of rhythm and many melodies. Eastman had heard and was inspired by Patti Smith’s Rock N Roll Nigger, and he used that opening rhythm in Joan, using it throughout much of the piece.
In the early 1980s, the Creative Music Foundation received a grant to make three radio programs featuring three composers. Eastman was chosen to be one of these composers, and Joan was recorded at the Third Street Music School Settlement with ten freelance cellists, in a barely rehearsed and quickly recorded session. Steve Cellum was the recording engineer, and he remembers that a couple of weeks after the session, while trying to choose which take to use, Eastman casually mentioned that he wanted to record a vocal introduction, something that hadn’t been mentioned before then. So Cellum lugged his equipment up to Eastman’s tiny East Village apartment, which was not a very good recording situation, but is how Prelude came to be recorded. As far as I know, it was never performed with a live performance of Joan. I had always assumed that it was added in order to fulfill a time requirement for the radio program, but it turns out that there was no such requirement. Also recorded was a spoken introduction, which was the program notes from the Kitchen performance:
Dear Joan,
Find presented a work of art, in your name, full of honor, integrity, and boundless courage. This work of art, like all works of art in your name, can never and will never match your most inspired passion. These works of art are like so many insignificant pebbles at your precious feet. But I offer it none the less. I offer it as a reminder to those who think that they can destroy liberators by acts of treachery, malice, and murder. They forget that the mind has memory. They forget that Good Character is the foundation of all acts. They think that no one sees the corruption of their deeds, and like all organizations (especially governments and religious organizations), they oppress in order to perpetuate themselves. Their methods of oppression are legion, but when they find that their more subtle methods are failing, they resort to murder. Even now in my own country, my own people, my own time, gross oppression and murder still continue. Therefore I take your name and meditate upon it, but not as much as I should.
Dear Joan,
When meditating on your name I am given strength and dedication. Dear Joan I have dedicated myself to the liberation of my own person firstly. I shall emancipate myself from the materialistic dreams of my parents; I shall emancipate myself from the bind of the past and the present; I shall emancipate myself from myself.
Dear Joan,
There is not much more to say except Thank You. And please accept this work of art, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, as a sincere act of love and devotion.
Yours with love,
Julius Eastman
One Dedicated to Emancipation
As verbose as the spoken introduction is, the Prelude is the opposite. It is 11:45, but only uses fifteen words, three of which are only used once.
Saint Michael said
Saint Margaret said
Saint Catherine said
They said
He said
She said
Joan
Speak Boldly
When they question you [used only once]
The three saints mentioned are the ones that Joan of Arc claimed to hear, and who counseled her to speak boldly at her trial for heresy.
Even more minimal than the text is the musical material: consisting almost exclusively of descending notes in a minor chord, a minor rising third, and alternating minor seconds. I was shocked when I realized this, as the piece is so engrossing, that you don’t notice how little is happening musically. There really is no musical development, no compositional sleight of hand, and the words are repetitious. Just plain singing, no extended techniques, no ornamentation. There is the voice, though, and the conviction behind it, the meditation on Joan of Arc, that draws you in. It is probably Eastman’s most minimal work, pared of any excess, and it is ironic that it is paired with Joan, which is probably the most through-written piece of his, and with as dense a texture as Prelude is bare.
Nate Wooley: First of all, what’s your general impression? You’ve never heard any Julius Eastman before?
Bojan Vuletic: No.
NW: What are your first thoughts, before I start giving you any information?
BV: Obviously it was clergical in some sense. As there are no instruments accompanying the singing, and it feels like it has some kind of calling it is clear to me that it could be performed in a church. I guess that’s where the musical language comes from.
NW: Do you think that’s why he used monophony?
BV: Yes, that’s apparent, I think.
NW: Now that you’ve seen that he was an African-American composer, I’ll tell you a little bit more about him. He worked mostly in the 1970s. As you noticed from the titles of some of his other pieces, there’s a political element there…some of the titles could be a bit shocking, I guess. With that knowledge, what do you think of the content of the opening. Does it take on a different quality to you?
BV: Of course, yes. If that piece had been sung by a priest, this wouldn’t appeal to me. I think there is definitely some kind of contradiction in the performance. It’s the composer singing right? So, it’s what’s in his head. It’s a little bit over the top from the very first moment; more than you would need to to have your voice be heard in a church, so there’s something to that. And, I think if he composed these other pieces with provocative names, there is probably a political statement.
NW: Did you feel that it was a liturgical sounding piece based on the musical choices and also the fact that he’s invoking the names of saints or by the way he was singing? What part of the way that he sang it played into the way you perceived it?
BV: There was a strangeness before I had any information, because I was actually expecting it to erupt in some ways. And, there were two or three moments where it went somewhere else: one being where he sang the ½ steps.
At the beginning, I thought, “oh, he’ll deconstruct all this”. But, hearing the whole piece I would say…just me, being a non-native speaker,…”St. whatever said”…said in the sense of told [spoke], right?
NW: Yes.
BV: It was like an endless train in a sense, so it could have been St. George said [that] St. Peter said [that], etc. It could be read in that way. But now I think it’s more like whoever is calling, no one is answering (laughs)
NW: Or that he’s not going to reveal what they said.
BV: Well, that could be another thing. In that sense I thought it was; well this is guesswork, but for me when you look at the language of the church, it’s a sort of code. It took a lot of time before the mass was read in the language that the people lived..it was read in Latin, so that was a kind of a code. In this context, that was an association I had. The church is calling you, naming names, but not telling you what it is.
NW: Do you feel like you miss harmony at all in this piece?
BV: No.
NW: What role do you think harmony plays in this composition?
BV: It’s clear he’s suggesting the harmony with the melody, and it’s mostly ostinato figures, so it’s very clear the way it’s structured. There is a thing that he did move sometimes with his voice down a minor second, but not in a completely clear way, so it could either be an intonation thing or it give it a little twist. It has a feeling like a naïve painting approach to me; very clear colors; very simple. But then there’s a twist to it somehow.
NW: But also it seems to me that in naïve painting that there’s a certain kind of expression that comes from the simplicity of it. This is one of the thigns that you’re not getting as part of the project is that this is a prologue to another piece. That pieces is a cello octet that’s more dense.
BV: So the prologue is monophonic and then the piece is dense? That makes sense.
NW: Did you have a different feeling about it when you found out more about him?
BV: For me, the piece didn’t have a connection to what I would think of as African-American musical culture, so it was a surprise to find out he was African-American There were two things that are actually out of a different cultural context, but I had an association with [when listening to this piece]. I had one project called Polyphonie and it was about the hidden treasures that are present, musically, in people from other cultures living in Germany. I did a lot of exploring there and it was pretty interesting. One [of the participants] was a Jewish cantor singing a capella and it sounded nearly like a contemporary piece. Since I didn’t understand what he was saying, I was just looking for musical structures. I could see it had a strong complexity. When I talked to him and figured out what he was doing, I realized it actually had very simply structures behind it. In this context, I find that idea very interesting because [Eastman] is laying out the structure very clearly. So, when you say it’s a prologue to something else, I feel like this becomes the key to what comes after.
NW: I think with Eastman, too, his other music is loosely aligned (in my head at least) with minimalism like Steve Reich/Philip Glass…there’s complexity, but the structure is very clear.
BV: But the big difference between this and a Philip Glass piece is, there seems to be a concert hall attitude to the Glass vocal pieces I’ve heard, which this piece doesn’t have at all. I think if it had that attitude I couldn’t listen to it. I wouldn’t be able to stand it I think. I think it’s very interesting that it’s the composer singing this. I think if it was a repertoire piece for a concert hall, I would hate it probably (laughs)
NW: Well, he’s very heavily classically trained
BV: Yeah, but it’s not obvious, he’s not showing off. It’s funny as well, because I expected this arc, especially with monophonic music I expect a large arc, but he starts very hot and only at the end does he have this deep dynamic fall to almost whispering. It’s a very interesting and strange structure.
http://www.artnews.com/2018/02/07/speak-boldly-question-kitchen-moving-multifarious-tribute-composer-julius-eastman/
It is not even the second week of February, but the Kitchen’s festival for the late, great composer Julius Eastman, “That Which Is Fundamental,” has already firmly secured a spot as one of highlights of 2018 in New York. A string of exhilarating performances, all sold out, have concluded, but a treasure box of an exhibition of Eastman’s archival materials remains on view through this Saturday at the Chelsea alternative space alongside a moving show, inspired by the artist’s work, of contemporary art, including pieces by Sondra Perry, Carolyn Lazard, and Chloë Bass. Recordings of the long-neglected musician’s work have trickled online, and there are records available, too, plus a book. If you are not yet a fan of Eastman, who died in 1990, at the age of 49, now is the time to become one.
Many of Eastman’s compositions are ingenious studies in repetition and endurance, plumbing the effects they can generate on a spectrum ranging from the sublime to the monstrous. His works churn and metamorphose slowly—and sometimes violently. His compositions are about how minute ideas and groups of individual players can clash and battle, then come together and yield outside returns. In this way, they have links to contemporaneous creations like the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, the hand-fashioned nets of Eva Hesse, the blurred abstract paintings of Jack Whitten, David Diao, and Gerhard Richter, and the “Wave” paintings of Lee Lozano. These are all works in which thrilling surprises emerge from relentless repetition. They gallantly engage with chance and improvisation in ways that can evince vulnerability and trauma.
At the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, on January 28, four players, each at their own piano, hit the keys rapid-fire, building waves of sound as they traded a recurring motif amongst themselves. This was the 1979 work Evil Nigger (1979), and it was, at most moments, amazingly formidable: pure power resounded through that huge warehouse space. But then it would turn precarious, even fragile, as the pianos went in disparate, dissonant directions. When that happened, Joseph Kubera, one of the four players, would shout “1–2–3–4!,” then he and the others—Dynasty Battles, Michelle Cann, and Adam Tender—would be at it again, united, charging deeper into the piece, like a metal version of Flight of the Bumblebee improbably written for piano. The audience, sitting on all four sides of the musicians, rewarded their virtuosic 20-minute performance with thunderous applause.
And some of the festival’s most touching moments came with the performance of Eastman’s vocal works. For Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, Julian Terrell Otis performed a capella, with high drama, as he teased nuance out of just a few lines: “Saint Michael said/Saint Margaret said/Saint Catherine said/They said/He said/She said/Joan/Speak Boldly/When they question you.”
Copyright 2019, Art Media ARTNEWS, llc. 110 Greene Street, 2nd Fl., New York, N.Y. 10012. All rights reserved.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts/music/minimalist-composer-julius-eastman-dead-for-26-years-crashes-the-canon.html
The cover of an archival recording of Julius Eastman’s “Femenine.”
The cover of a 2015 book of essays on Julius Eastman.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR14 of the New York edition with the headline: A Composer ‘to the Fullest’ Enters the Canon. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
https://www.musicworks.ca/reviews/recordings/kukuruz-quartet-julius-eastman%E2%80%94piano-interpretations
This perhaps wilful forgetting, Lewis suggests, is the result of persistent framing of the avant-garde as an extension of European (read: white) artistic traditions. Eastman—a gay American of African decent—seems, even feels, to have been plenty aware of his cultural confinement. His titling of works (his portfolio also includes Nigger Faggot, Crazy Nigger, Dirty Nigger and If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?) is confrontational, even aggressive, while the works themselves are sometimes meditative, sometimes intellectually stimulating. Eastman isn’t challenging us to forget him, though, so much as he’s saying that he knows we will. It’s our job to prove him wrong, so that future generations see a late twentieth-century minimalism that doesn’t only have the complexion of Cage and Feldman. Kukuruz has done much to help stave off that near certainty. And so long as his text isn’t left along the edge of the information superhighway, Lewis has done so as well.
Composer Julius Eastman (1940-90) is not having an easy resurrection. But was anything about him ever easy?
His best pieces are acclaimed — though they have provocative, unprintable titles.
Under
such odds, the current festival "Julius Eastman: That Which is
Fundamental" presents 10 of his works this month at the Rotunda in
University City, through May 26. Two full rooms of archival materials
are displayed at the nearby Slought Foundation. There's more to come in
future years, though nobody is sure what or how much.
"Black, openly gay, virtuosic, and arrogant" was how Eastman was described Friday by his younger brother Gerry at the festival opening. It was a magnetic combination in cutting-edge circles, but less welcome in the rest of the world.
It was a wild time. Mary Jane Leach worked alongside him as a vocalist during that period in 1981: "At 10 a.m., Julius breezed in, dressed in black leather and chains, drinking Scotch," she wrote in an album note for an Eastman recording. "That was my introduction to the outrageousness that was Julius Eastman, who strove to push his identities as a gay black man and musician to the fullest."
Scholars of centuries-old music are used to exhaustively piecing together enough evidence to yield a performance. Though Eastman's world is more chronologically recent, it's also strangely distant. Gerry Eastman had some scores. A blue suitcase owned by his late mother, Frances, yielded others. Hurt has spent days leafing through endless newspaper clippings in Buffalo, yielding a clue here and there that makes another piece fall into place. Friday's performance of Femenine, for example.
His story is that of an unfinished symphony. You don't have the luxury of understanding what's there from the perspective of where it led. Hurt readily refers to Eastman as a creative genius. But will the full range of that genius ever be heard?
Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental continues May 12, 19 and 26 at The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St. Tickets: $12-$25.
Information:267-231-9813.www.ThatWhichIsFundamental.com. Exhibition through May 28 at Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., noon-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, free.
https://www.indiewire.com/2014/05/consider-the-mysterious-life-death-of-african-american-composer-pianist-julius-eastman-for-your-next-film-project-235661/
Art
SHARJAH, UAE — “There are of course 99 names of Allah, but there are 52 niggers. So therefore, I will be playing two of these niggers.” This is what Julius Eastman said during his introduction to the Northwestern University audience at a concert in June of 1980, and it is repeated in the Otolith Group‘s piece “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017), presented at this year’s Sharjah Biennial.
During the video, that lasts 50 minutes, two performers (a black man, Dante Micheaux, and a black woman, Elaine Mitchener) recite the entire statement. It is a riveting recitation by both actors, whose deliveries are very different. Micheaux, who performs at the beginning of the video, is calm and matter of fact in his approach, while Mitchener at certain points wails, as if begging the audience to hear and understand the import of what she says. After the actors’ declamation the pianists play — four pianists at two pianos bring “Evil Nigger,” “Gay Guerrilla,” and “Crazy Nigger,” to life. The appearance of the four pianists provide an odd visual contrast: they are all white and their faces are marked with abstract shapes contrived with silver makeup. The combination of the extraordinary visuals and the minimalist music of Eastman — an avant-garde, black, gay composer of music that sounds otherwordly — keeps me in my seat with no sense of time passing.
The Otolith Group “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017) (still) HD video, 50 minutes The Otolith Group “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017) (still) HD video, 50 minutes The Otolith Group “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017) (still) HD video, 50 minutes
Joy Boy by Julius Eastman& Unearthed by Frozen Reeds in 2017, this recording of Eastman’s queer-themed Joy Boy was performed by the S.E.M. ensemble, at the same concert as his well sought out Femenine. The piece consists of staccato reed and a vocal quartet that work together, in ways that are simultaneously obtuse and harmonious. The voices are strange and unwavering, further complimented by an incidental noise from shuffling audience members and chesty coughs. The naked tempestuousness of this piece can give the listener the illusion of knowing more about Eastman than is actually possible. The piece is so riddled with imperfection yet in total somehow it translates to the polar opposite. A demonstration of just how rash the human voice can be.
Julius Eastman - Femenine (1974)
This 2016 release of a 1974 Eastman performance offers a completely new perspective on his body of work. Femenine is one of a select few ways by which you can actually experience Eastman as a performer. According to many he’d always been an eccentric presence. In one instance Mary Jane Leach described him as having turned up to a choir performance dressed in leather and chains. His overt queerness, pushed Eastman away from the strictly hetero world of classical. Even the quietly queer John Cage was said to be repulsed by explicit, homoerotic reframing of his own Song Books by S.E.M. Ensemble, during which Eastman stripped male singers naked on stage.
The title of Femenine, is the first overt reference Eastman makes to gender nonconformity. While a reference to the reality of being effeminate in 70s New York is bold in itself, the piece yields something just as subversive.
In many ways it is a sister composition not only to Masculine but to Stay On It too. It shares the same buoyant vibrancy and general infectiousness. Beginning with machine controlled sleigh bells that perpetuate through the 72 minute duration, Femmine is testament to both Eastman’s sense of humour and derision of his contemporaries. This machine programmed instrument almost seems to satirise the almost industrial performance that can turn many off from the contemporary classical music of that time.
Julius Eastman - Evil N*gger (1979)
This is a part of a self-titled series, which were a collection of pieces written in the late 70s and early 80s. The pieces, and this one in particular, characterises the identity politics of his music. It’s a challenge not only to the musical politics of New York’s avant-garde, which is often documented as bigoted but also a challenge to its social politics. And Evil N*gger is one of Eastman’s loudest statements. Not only a reclamation of the slur in its title, it is formally bold and provocative with an integrally defiant and restless energy. This power is created through an evocative dark piano composition and is profoundly epic in the most acute way possible. Minimalism is often accused of being devoid of passion and emotion but this is not something that can be levelled at the work of Eastman.
Julius Eastman- Gay Guerrilla (1980)
The worlds of contemporary classical and (for the most part) the avant-garde in the 70s and 80s, weren't the most accommodating of scenes for the person of colour or the queer alike. The miasmic entrenchment of the classical and traditional rung true then, just as many say it does it does now. As the militant queer dichotomy Gay Guerrilla is combative of this, and it is far from timid in what it’s trying to say.
Beginning in lonely stuttering notes, slowly unraveling into defiant crescendos, before the final part repurposes Martin Luther’s A Mighty Fortress Is Our God into a queer manifesto. Gay Guerrilla exposes the very best aspects of Eastman as a composer and social commentator. And while racial and sexual politics inform Eastman’s work greatly, they certainly don’t define them. He expresses feeling in its coldest and most naked form. Understanding this begins with the acknowledgment that Eastman is a black gay man. Gay Guerilla is one of the most moving pieces ever to be written for eight hands. Propulsive – it’s a bombastic tragedy, and a deeply saddening one.
Meredith Monk-Dolmen Music (1981)
Luminaries to one another, the artistic connection between Eastman and Meredith Monk was long and meaningful. While Eastman provides the foreboding organ on the opener to what many consider Monk’s opus Turtle Dreams, his monastic vocals on Dolmen Music’s final piece is their greatest collaboration. Monk’s explorations of human vocal texture enamoured Eastman more than that of any other contemporary composer. And when you look at what he tries to achieve with his own music, the connection becomes quite obvious.
Dolmen Music traverses the complexities of the masculine and the feminine through means of voice. And the climax of this record sees them combine forces harmoniously. While it would certainly be a stretch to call Eastman a gender abolitionist, with the little information we actually have about him, his work does seem intent on destroying binaries as much as possible.
Dolmen Music was later sampled by DJ Shadow on Endtroducing thus forging a tenuous bridge between Eastman and the mainstream.
Dinosaur L - 24→24 Music (1981)
Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell are not too dissimilar. It’s easy to categorise both as under-appreciated queer icons who died way too early. Both were never credited with the acclaim they deserved. Their music can be something of a hotspot for queer tourist record collectors alike. What better way to support the cause then buying into Russell who died of AIDS in 1992? That’s not to discredit straight people who love Arthur Russell - his music is about much more than being gay - but records like World Of Echo in particular will always be a sacred part of queer musical history. And revisionist history can often leave that aspect out thus erasing queer narratives.
If Arthur Russell’s lyrics encapsulate being gay in the 80s then Eastman’s instrumentals score it. Julius Eastman conducted a large amount of Russell’s orchestral recordings , but their most notable convergence comes in the world of disco arguably one of the first genre subcultures to be a somewhat LGBT safe space.
Eastman plays organ and provides baritone backing on Dinosaur L’s 24→24 Music, which is probably the biggest floor filling record for Eastman, if not Russell. At times awkwardly programmed beats, cartoonish vocals, a no wave aesthetic and lyrics like “You’re gonna be clean on your bean”, make it hard to understand. 24→24 Music is the weirdest outlier in Eastman’s Career.
Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner (2013)
One aspect of Eastman’s personality that’s often underestimated is his sense of humour. Even though he wasn't shy of tackling grave issues this wasn't a constant thing for him. In the excellent documentary Without A Net Renee Levine Packer describes him as “very funny but also very serious. Very serious and grave at his core even though he’d assume [resemblance] of someone who was very relaxed.” The Jace Clayton 2013 live tribute to Eastman is testament to this. As well as performing many of his pieces the show envisages a world in which Julius Eastman is a coffee table composer and household name through vignette and parody. In one instance Clayton Skype interviews Arooj Aftab for the role of Julius Eastman Impersonator.
Kukuruz Quartet - Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations (2018)
Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations by Kukuruz Quartet
The new and justified resurgence in interest in Eastman’s music over the past few years has meant that reinterpretations of his work have become an inevitability. Kurukuz Quartet connect themselves with Eastman in 2014 where they performed his music to standing ovations in Athens. Last year the Zürich ensemble rendered four of Eastman’s finest piano pieces for CD release. Fugue no. 7, Evil N*gger, Buddha and Gay Guerrilla.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/02/05/julius-eastman-music
Rehearsal of Julius Eastman’s piece "Trumpet" at Buffalo Unitarian Church in 1972.
(Ron Hammond)
(PHOTO: Julius Eastman by Ron Hammond)
Julius Eastman:
Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental
is an interdisciplinary, multi-artist project that examines the life,
work, and resurgent influence of Julius Eastman, a gay African American
composer and performer who was active internationally in the 1970s and
80s, but who died homeless at the age of 49, leaving an incomplete but
compelling collection of scores and recordings. The culmination of more
than three years of research, this first iteration of this project will
take place in Philadelphia in May 2017. Events include four major
concerts - including several modern “premieres” of recently recovered
works - and a multi-disciplinary exhibition featuring archival materials
and work by ten contemporary artists who engage with Eastman and the
fragmented nature of his legacy.
That Which Is Fundamental is the first comprehensive examination of Eastman's legacy to work alongside the Eastman Estate, an organization led by Gerry Eastman to gather together, organize, preserve, disseminate, and generally further the work of his brother, Julius.
Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental is a project of Bowerbird, a Philadelphia based non profit dedicated to presenting experimental music and related art forms. For more info visit: www.bowerbird.org
listen to julius eastman
julius eastman: experimental intermedia excerpt
In his article The Composer as Weakling, Julius Eastman (1940-90) wrote about “the poor relationship between composer and instrumentalist, and the puny state of the contemporary composer in the classical music world. If we make a survey of classical music programming or look at the curriculum and attitudes in our conservatories, we would be led to believe that today’s instrumentalist lacks imagination, scholarship, a modicum of curiosity; or we would be led to believe that music was born in 1700, lived a full life until 1850 at which time music caught an incurable disease and finally died in 1900.” 1
Eastman certainly didn’t lack scholarship, having graduated from the Curtis Institute with a degree in composition. And he most certainly did not lack imagination or curiosity. He was both a composer and a gifted vocalist and pianist. In addition to his own compositions, he performed a wide variety of music. Best known for his performance of Peter Maxwell-Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, one of the most demanding vocal parts in twentieth-century music, he also performed music from all periods, from Bach to Haydn to Richard Strauss to [Gian Carlo] Menotti and [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, often under the baton of famous conductors such as Lukas Foss, Pierre Boulez, and Zubin Mehta. He was also familiar with jazz and improvisation, at times performing with his brother Gerry, a bassist with the Count Basie Band, among other groups. His compositions evince the culmination of the wide variety of music that he was exposed to, creating music that is indisputably and uniquely his own.
Writing authoritatively about Eastman is somewhat precarious, as much of his work, both scores and recordings, were lost when he was evicted from his East Village apartment in New York City in 1983 or 84. The sheriff had dumped his possessions onto the street, with Eastman making no effort to recover any of his music. Various friends, upon hearing this, tried to salvage as much as they could, but most was lost. So inferences have to be drawn from the few scores and recordings that do exist, coupled with concert reviews and recollections of people involved in these events, some of which contradict each other.
He moved to New York in 1976 and I have a feeling that, once he left Buffalo, he didn't have access to the same kind of ready group of musicians to perform his work. So, he began to create pieces that he could perform solo, either on piano or as a vocalist. He had two solo concerts in New York that year: one at Environ, Praise God From Whom All Devils Grow, which was reviewed, and another at Experimental Intermedia Foundation, for which there was a recording. Both concerts were improvisational in nature.
In his review of the Environ concert, Tom Johnson noted that “There are probably more composers-performers today than ever before. Many composers have had traditional performing skills, but people like Paganini and Rachmaninoff, whose music really depended on their performance abilities, have been rare….But of course, there are also purely artistic reasons why musicians sometimes prefer to write for themselves instead of for other performers. In some cases composers really seem to find themselves once they begin looking inside their own voices and instruments, and come up with strong personal statements that never quite came through as long as the were creating music for others to play.” He went on to note that Eastman played piano in a “high-energy, free-jazz style,” and sang in a “crazed baritone.” 2 Joseph Horowitz also noted that the singing was “often demonic.” 3 It seems that he usually didn’t combine voice and piano in these concerts, and that his piano playing tended more towards free jazz, while his vocal solos were more minimal and in the style of Avant-Garde classical music.
Listening to his Experimental Intermedia concert, which was primarily solo voice, the singing was fairly ornate and melismatic. At times it even seemed medieval, especially Spanish medieval music, with rhythms being tapped out in that style. Although he had used extended vocal techniques in earlier pieces, such as Macle, written in 1971, this singing is fairly straightforward.
His use of text in the Experimental Intermedia concert, source unknown, is very interesting and reminiscent of Gertrude Stein. For the first 2:20, only four words are sung “To know the difference,” usually in groups of one or two words. Gradually, words are added, usually one at a time, so that by 4:42 sixteen words are being sung in various combinations “To know the difference between the one without another. But he is the one behind the zero. To know the difference between the one and the zero.” By 6:28 twenty-four words are being sung, adding: “Be known to you and to me that the one is after zero and his place is one. His place is behind the zero. His name is one.”
The work of Gertrude Stein was very well known in the circles that Eastman was part of. She wrote in a repetitive style, using a limited vocabulary, as in the example below.
He had been nicely faithful. In being one he was one who had he been one continuing would not have been one continuing being nicely faithful. He was one continuing, he was not continuing to be nicely faithful. In continuing he was being one being the one who was saying good good, excellent but in continuing he was needing that he was believing that he was aspiring to be one continuing to be able to be saying good good, excellent. He had been one saying good good, excellent. He had been that one. 4
Eastman had worked with Petr Kotik in the SEM Ensemble from 1969-75. Kotik wrote Many, Many Women, using text by Stein, and which Eastman performed in at various stages of its development. He also had met and performed with Virgil Thomson, who had written two operas using texts by Stein. And, one of his close collaborators, the choreographer Andrew deGroat, for whom Eastman wrote The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (Joan), was a big fan of Stein. Besides having their use of repetition in common, Stein was searching for the “bottom nature” 5 of her characters, while Eastman was searching for “that which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness.” 6 They were both gay.
Eastman’s Praise God From Whom All Devils Grow concert at Environ, which made a profane interpretation of the hymn Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow, is his first instance of an overt reference to a religious text, although in a transgressive way. On the other hand, his Experimental Intermedia concert, while it had no overt religious references, juxtaposed super-8 film showing dog shit and close-ups of a drag queen, displaying in your face sexuality and depravity.
By 1978 Eastman, who was black and flamboyantly gay, was composing pieces that were part of a “Nigger” series of works, Nigger Faggot (NF) and Dirty Nigger, both for chamber ensemble, as well as Crazy Nigger, for multiples of one instrument, but usually performed on pianos. It was the first of a trio of pieces usually performed on four pianos. The other two pieces, Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla, were written in 1979. Although their titles are provocative, the music isn’t, and they are probably the pieces that sealed Eastman’s reputation as an excellent composer.
So there was this duality going on in Eastman’s work – provocative titles, texts, and multi-media paired with ecstatic music. Gradually actual religious texts began to be used by Eastman, and at least by spring of 1980 he was improvising using religious texts, with titles such as Humanity and the Four Books of Confucious. He was a spiritual person and used texts from many religions.
In 1981 he wrote Joan, scored for ten cellos, that was paired with de Groat’s dance Gravy, which was presented at The Kitchen in New York. It is a vital, through-written, and dense piece full of rhythm and many melodies. Eastman had heard and was inspired by Patti Smith’s Rock N Roll Nigger, and he used that opening rhythm in Joan, using it throughout much of the piece.
In the early 1980s, the Creative Music Foundation received a grant to make three radio programs featuring three composers. Eastman was chosen to be one of these composers, and Joan was recorded at the Third Street Music School Settlement with ten freelance cellists, in a barely rehearsed and quickly recorded session. Steve Cellum was the recording engineer, and he remembers that a couple of weeks after the session, while trying to choose which take to use, Eastman casually mentioned that he wanted to record a vocal introduction, something that hadn’t been mentioned before then. So Cellum lugged his equipment up to Eastman’s tiny East Village apartment, which was not a very good recording situation, but is how Prelude came to be recorded. As far as I know, it was never performed with a live performance of Joan. I had always assumed that it was added in order to fulfill a time requirement for the radio program, but it turns out that there was no such requirement. Also recorded was a spoken introduction, which was the program notes from the Kitchen performance:
Dear Joan,
Find presented a work of art, in your name, full of honor, integrity, and boundless courage. This work of art, like all works of art in your name, can never and will never match your most inspired passion. These works of art are like so many insignificant pebbles at your precious feet. But I offer it none the less. I offer it as a reminder to those who think that they can destroy liberators by acts of treachery, malice, and murder. They forget that the mind has memory. They forget that Good Character is the foundation of all acts. They think that no one sees the corruption of their deeds, and like all organizations (especially governments and religious organizations), they oppress in order to perpetuate themselves. Their methods of oppression are legion, but when they find that their more subtle methods are failing, they resort to murder. Even now in my own country, my own people, my own time, gross oppression and murder still continue. Therefore I take your name and meditate upon it, but not as much as I should.
Dear Joan,
When meditating on your name I am given strength and dedication. Dear Joan I have dedicated myself to the liberation of my own person firstly. I shall emancipate myself from the materialistic dreams of my parents; I shall emancipate myself from the bind of the past and the present; I shall emancipate myself from myself.
Dear Joan,
There is not much more to say except Thank You. And please accept this work of art, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, as a sincere act of love and devotion.
Yours with love,
Julius Eastman
One Dedicated to Emancipation
As verbose as the spoken introduction is, the Prelude is the opposite. It is 11:45, but only uses fifteen words, three of which are only used once.
Saint Michael said
Saint Margaret said
Saint Catherine said
They said
He said
She said
Joan
Speak Boldly
When they question you [used only once]
The three saints mentioned are the ones that Joan of Arc claimed to hear, and who counseled her to speak boldly at her trial for heresy.
Even more minimal than the text is the musical material: consisting almost exclusively of descending notes in a minor chord, a minor rising third, and alternating minor seconds. I was shocked when I realized this, as the piece is so engrossing, that you don’t notice how little is happening musically. There really is no musical development, no compositional sleight of hand, and the words are repetitious. Just plain singing, no extended techniques, no ornamentation. There is the voice, though, and the conviction behind it, the meditation on Joan of Arc, that draws you in. It is probably Eastman’s most minimal work, pared of any excess, and it is ironic that it is paired with Joan, which is probably the most through-written piece of his, and with as dense a texture as Prelude is bare.
Nate Wooley: First of all, what’s your general impression? You’ve never heard any Julius Eastman before?
Bojan Vuletic: No.
NW: What are your first thoughts, before I start giving you any information?
BV: Obviously it was clergical in some sense. As there are no instruments accompanying the singing, and it feels like it has some kind of calling it is clear to me that it could be performed in a church. I guess that’s where the musical language comes from.
NW: Do you think that’s why he used monophony?
BV: Yes, that’s apparent, I think.
NW: Now that you’ve seen that he was an African-American composer, I’ll tell you a little bit more about him. He worked mostly in the 1970s. As you noticed from the titles of some of his other pieces, there’s a political element there…some of the titles could be a bit shocking, I guess. With that knowledge, what do you think of the content of the opening. Does it take on a different quality to you?
BV: Of course, yes. If that piece had been sung by a priest, this wouldn’t appeal to me. I think there is definitely some kind of contradiction in the performance. It’s the composer singing right? So, it’s what’s in his head. It’s a little bit over the top from the very first moment; more than you would need to to have your voice be heard in a church, so there’s something to that. And, I think if he composed these other pieces with provocative names, there is probably a political statement.
NW: Did you feel that it was a liturgical sounding piece based on the musical choices and also the fact that he’s invoking the names of saints or by the way he was singing? What part of the way that he sang it played into the way you perceived it?
BV: There was a strangeness before I had any information, because I was actually expecting it to erupt in some ways. And, there were two or three moments where it went somewhere else: one being where he sang the ½ steps.
At the beginning, I thought, “oh, he’ll deconstruct all this”. But, hearing the whole piece I would say…just me, being a non-native speaker,…”St. whatever said”…said in the sense of told [spoke], right?
NW: Yes.
BV: It was like an endless train in a sense, so it could have been St. George said [that] St. Peter said [that], etc. It could be read in that way. But now I think it’s more like whoever is calling, no one is answering (laughs)
NW: Or that he’s not going to reveal what they said.
BV: Well, that could be another thing. In that sense I thought it was; well this is guesswork, but for me when you look at the language of the church, it’s a sort of code. It took a lot of time before the mass was read in the language that the people lived..it was read in Latin, so that was a kind of a code. In this context, that was an association I had. The church is calling you, naming names, but not telling you what it is.
NW: Do you feel like you miss harmony at all in this piece?
BV: No.
NW: What role do you think harmony plays in this composition?
BV: It’s clear he’s suggesting the harmony with the melody, and it’s mostly ostinato figures, so it’s very clear the way it’s structured. There is a thing that he did move sometimes with his voice down a minor second, but not in a completely clear way, so it could either be an intonation thing or it give it a little twist. It has a feeling like a naïve painting approach to me; very clear colors; very simple. But then there’s a twist to it somehow.
NW: But also it seems to me that in naïve painting that there’s a certain kind of expression that comes from the simplicity of it. This is one of the thigns that you’re not getting as part of the project is that this is a prologue to another piece. That pieces is a cello octet that’s more dense.
BV: So the prologue is monophonic and then the piece is dense? That makes sense.
NW: Did you have a different feeling about it when you found out more about him?
BV: For me, the piece didn’t have a connection to what I would think of as African-American musical culture, so it was a surprise to find out he was African-American There were two things that are actually out of a different cultural context, but I had an association with [when listening to this piece]. I had one project called Polyphonie and it was about the hidden treasures that are present, musically, in people from other cultures living in Germany. I did a lot of exploring there and it was pretty interesting. One [of the participants] was a Jewish cantor singing a capella and it sounded nearly like a contemporary piece. Since I didn’t understand what he was saying, I was just looking for musical structures. I could see it had a strong complexity. When I talked to him and figured out what he was doing, I realized it actually had very simply structures behind it. In this context, I find that idea very interesting because [Eastman] is laying out the structure very clearly. So, when you say it’s a prologue to something else, I feel like this becomes the key to what comes after.
NW: I think with Eastman, too, his other music is loosely aligned (in my head at least) with minimalism like Steve Reich/Philip Glass…there’s complexity, but the structure is very clear.
BV: But the big difference between this and a Philip Glass piece is, there seems to be a concert hall attitude to the Glass vocal pieces I’ve heard, which this piece doesn’t have at all. I think if it had that attitude I couldn’t listen to it. I wouldn’t be able to stand it I think. I think it’s very interesting that it’s the composer singing this. I think if it was a repertoire piece for a concert hall, I would hate it probably (laughs)
NW: Well, he’s very heavily classically trained
BV: Yeah, but it’s not obvious, he’s not showing off. It’s funny as well, because I expected this arc, especially with monophonic music I expect a large arc, but he starts very hot and only at the end does he have this deep dynamic fall to almost whispering. It’s a very interesting and strange structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Eastman
Julius Eastman (October 27, 1940 – May 28, 1990) was an American composer, pianist, vocalist, and dancer whose work fell under minimalism.
He was among the first musicians to combine minimalist processes with
elements of pop music, as well as, within his music, present dramatic
and suspenseful tendencies. He often gave his pieces titles with
provocative political intent, such as Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla.
At the behest of Foss, Eastman joined the Creative Associates—a "prestigious program in avant-garde classical music" that "carried a stipend but no teaching obligations"[1]—at SUNY Buffalo's Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. During this period, he met Petr Kotik, a Czech-born composer, conductor, and flutist. Eastman and Kotik performed together extensively in the early to mid-1970s. Along with Kotik, Eastman was a founding member of the S.E.M. Ensemble.
From 1971 he performed and toured with the group, and composed numerous works for it. During this period, fifteen of Eastman's earliest works were performed by the Creative Associates, including Stay On It (1973), an early augury of postminimalism and one of the first art music compositions inspired by progressions from popular music, presaging the later innovations of Arthur Russell and Rhys Chatham. Although Eastman began to teach theory and composition courses over the course of his tenure, he left Buffalo in 1975 following a controversially ribald performance of John Cage's aleatoric Songbooks by the S.E.M. Ensemble under the aegis of Morton Feldman. It included nudity and homoerotic allusions interpolated by Eastman. The elderly Cage was incensed and said during an ensuing lecture that Eastman's "[ego]... is closed in on homosexuality. And we know this because he has no other ideas." Additionally, Eastman's friend Kyle Gann has speculated that his inability to acclimate to the more bureaucratic elements of academic life (including paperwork) may have hastened his departure from the university.[1]
Shortly thereafter, Eastman settled in New York City, where he initially straddled the divide between the conventionally bifurcated "uptown" and downtown music scenes. Eastman often wrote his music following what he called an "organic" principle. Each new section of a work contained all the information from previous sections, though sometimes "the information is taken out at a gradual and logical rate." The principle is most evident in his three works for four pianos, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla, all from around 1979. The last of these appropriates Martin Luther's hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," as a gay manifesto.[2] In 1976, Eastman participated in a performance of Eight Songs for a Mad King conducted by Pierre Boulez at Lincoln Center. He served as the first male vocalist in Meredith Monk's ensemble, as documented on her influential album Dolmen Music (1981). He fostered a strong kinship and collaboration with Arthur Russell, conducting nearly all of his orchestral recordings (compiled as First Thought Best Thought [Audika Records, 2006]) and participating (as organist and vocalist) in the recording of 24-24 Music (1982; released under the imprimatur of Dinosaur L), a controversial disco-influenced composition that included the underground dance hits "Go Bang!" and "In the Cornbelt"; both featured Eastman's trademark bravado.
During this period, he also played in a jazz ensemble with his brother Gerry, who previously played guitar in the Count Basie Orchestra. He also coordinated the Brooklyn Philharmonic's outreach-oriented Community Concert Series (performed by the CETA Orchestra and funded by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts) in conjunction with Foss and other composers of color. By 1980, he was regularly touring across the United States and internationally; a recording of a performance from that year at Northwestern University was released on the posthumous compilation Unjust Malaise (2005).[1]
A 1981 piece for Eastman's cello ensemble, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, was performed at The Kitchen in New York City. In 1986, the choreographer Molissa Fenley set her dance, Geologic Moments, to music of Philip Glass and two works by Eastman (an unknown work for two pianos and "One God" in which Eastman sang and played piano), which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Despondent about what he saw as a dearth of worthy professional opportunities, Eastman grew increasingly dependent on drugs after 1983. His life fell apart; many of his scores were impounded by the New York City Sheriff's Office following an eviction in the early 1980s, further impeding his professional development. While homeless, he briefly took refuge in Tompkins Square Park. His hope for a lectureship at Cornell University also failed to materialize during this period.
Despite a temporary attempt at a comeback, Eastman died alone at the age of 49 in Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, New York of cardiac arrest. No public notice was given to his death until an obituary by Kyle Gann appeared in the Village Voice; it was dated January 22, 1991, eight months after Eastman died.[3] As Eastman's notational methods were loose and open to interpretation, revival of his music has been a difficult task, dependent on people who worked with him.
In June 2006, the New York-based group Ne(x)tworks presented their score realization (by Cornelius Dufallo and Chris McIntyre) of Eastman's Stay On It at the ISSUE Project Room silo space on Carroll Street in Brooklyn.
In 2007 the California E A R Unit gave a performance of Crazy Nigger at REDCAT (The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex).
Eastman's piece Crazy Nigger was performed March 15, 2008, during 7th Edition Dag in de Branding Festival, The Hague, the Netherlands.[6]
On February 10, 2012, Luciano Chessa curated for Sarah Cahill's L@te Series of the Berkeley Art Museum/PFA the first Eastman retrospective. The concert included the performance of Eastman's Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla for six pianos, Eastman's last known composition, Our Father, and the first live performance of the Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, transcribed by bass Richard Mix under Chessa's invitation. The event also included Chessa's DJ live set of NY house music recordings featuring Eastman and his collaborators. The preview piece for this event in the SF Chronicle, by Joshua Kosman, is the first full writeup on Eastman ever to appear in a major US newspaper.[7]
On March 26, 2013, New Amsterdam Records released an album by Jace Clayton entitled The Julius Eastman Memory Depot. The album includes performances of "Evil Nigger" and "Gay Guerilla" by David Friend and Emily Manzo that have been manipulated and re-arranged by Clayton. The album's final track is a tribute to the late composer titled, "Callback from the American Society of Eastman Supporters."[8]
Performer/Composer Amy Knoles recently created a 4.0 solo live electronic version of Crazy Nigger. She toured the Pacific Northwest and Europe in the Fall of 2013, with a program called Julius Eastman FOUND.[9] She performed on the MalletKat with an elaborate system of loops, developed in Ableton LIVE with the Keith McMillen 12Step foot controller.
Lutosławski Piano Duo (Emilia Sitarz and Bartek Wąsik) have been performing his compositions regularly since 2014. Their repertoire contains "Evil Nigger" and "Gay Guerilla" (with Joanna Duda and Mischa Kozłowski). The premiere of their version of "Crazy Nigger" will take place in December during KWADROFONIK FESTIVAL in Warsaw.
In October 2015, Bowerbird, a Philadelphia-based non-profit presented Eastman's "Crazy Nigger" as the first event in a multi-year survey of the composer's work.[10]
A biography of Eastman, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, was released in December 2015.[11]
A larger Eastman retrospective took place at the London Contemporary Music Festival in December 2016, and included the presentation of seven Eastman works, several pieces closely associated with Eastman and an exhibition, spread over three nights.
On January 24, 2017, an evening of Eastman's works were presented as "A portrait of Julius Eastman" at the long-running modern classical music series, Monday Evening Concerts, in Los Angeles. The program consisted of "Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc" for solo baritone singer, "The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc" for ten cellos and "Crazy Nigger" for four pianos. The concert was very well received by a nearly sold out audience in the Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School for the Performing Arts.
MaerzMusik 2017 opened with three of Julius Eastman’s works for four pianos on March 17. Furthermore, from 17th to 26 March, the space of SAVVY Contemporary became a documentation center dedicated to the oeuvre of Julius Eastman.
In May 2017, after more than three years of research, Bowerbird presented "That Which Is Fundamental" - a four-concert retrospective and month-long exhibition of Eastman's work. Included in the festival were the modern premieres of several of Eastman's early works, including "Macle" and "Thruway". This project was the first retrospective produced in collaboration with the Eastman Estate.[12]
In February 2018 Luciano Chessa completed his edition of the Symphony No. II. The Faithful Friend, The Lover Friend's Love for the Beloved, Eastman's only work for large orchestra. On November 20 Chessa conducted Mannes Orchestra in the premiere of Eastman II at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in NYC to a considerable acclaim. The preview piece in The New York Times featured clips from the rehearsal of the piece[13], and a review followed [14]
In March 2018, MaerzMusik Festival as well as SAVVY Contemporary Berlin continued their interdisciplinary project on Julius Eastman with a series of German premieres of his pieces as well as world-premieres of newly commissioned pieces – in a series of concerts, an exhibition and a symposium with Mary Jane Leach, George E. Lewis, Christine Rusiniak, Kodwo Eshun, Rocco Di Pietro, and many others.[15]
In 2018 visual artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden curated an exhibition based on her research around Eastman at New York's The Kitchen. It included performances of his work and work of contemporary artists inspired by Eastman including Carolyn Lazard, Sondra Perry, and Chloe Bass and others.[16][17]
In 2018 visual artist Michael Anthony Garcia and composer Russell Reed performed Femenine with the Austin Chamber Music Festival.
Hanson-Dvoracek, Andrew, "Julius Eastman 's 1980 residency at Northwestern University" (thesis), University of Iowa, Summer 2011.
Wellins, Matt (December 6, 2005). "Dusted Reviews: "Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise"". Dusted.
Gann, Kyle (2005). "That which is fundamental: Julius Eastman 1940-1990". Music downtown: writings from The Village voice. University of California Press. p. 289. ISBN 0-520-22982-7.
"The world catches up to iconoclastic composer Julius Eastman". Chicago Reader. Retrieved February 15, 2019.
"Julius Eastman Scores". Mary Jane Leach. May 27, 2009. Retrieved June 4, 2009.
"Festival eigentijdse muziek Dag in de Branding EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED!". Dag in de Branding Festival. March 15, 2008. Retrieved June 4, 2009.[dead link]
Kosman, Joshua (February 9, 2012). "Honoring Julius Eastman's Music in Berkeley". sfgate.com. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
Greene, Jayson (March 28, 2013). "The Julius Eastman Memory Depot". pitchfork.com. Retrieved March 13, 2017.
Recent performances, Amy Knoles.
Bowerbird concerts, October 2015.
Packer, Renée Levine Packer; Leach, Mary Jane (15 December 2015). Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music. University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1580465342.
"That Which Is Fundamental", May 2017.
Colter Walls, Seth (November 16, 2018). "A Long-Lost Symphonic Love Story is Told Again". nytimes.com.com. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
da Fonseca-Wollheim, Corinna (November 21, 2018). "A Rediscovered Symphony Radiates Cosmic Grandeur". nytimes.com.com. Retrieved February 9, 2019.
"WE HAVE DELIVERED OURSELVES FROM THE TONAL – Of, with, towards, on Julius Eastman". S A V V Y Contemporary. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
"A Long-Lost Composer Is Raised From the Dead". The New York Times. Retrieved August 8, 2018.
spoken article (help·info)
https://spinningonair.org/episode-2-julius-eastman/
Photo of Julius Eastman from Ear Magazine archives; photographer unknown. Eastman’s likeness used by permission from the Julius Eastman estate / background image: Chris Garland
The
score to the hour-plus minimalist work has survived, but just last
year an archival recording by the S.E.M. Ensemble in Albany surfaced
that allowed performers to fill in the blanks, such as the hazy rhythmic
texture established by a set of jingle bells. How could anybody
maintain that exact rhythm for so long? One review described a
mechanical contraption invented to do the job. Also, Eastman served soup
during the performance — while wearing a dress.
Such
things weren't all that unusual in the 1970s avant-garde. Nor were
fragmentary scores. Acknowledged masterpieces such as Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians wasn't fully written down until years after its creation.
The question is whether these musical experiments still speak to the current century, and Femenine, performed
Friday at the Rotunda by the Arcana New Music Ensemble, turned out to
be as entrancing as anything written during that period by Reich or
Philip Glass. Underneath Eastman's incessantly repeated main theme, all
sorts of things arose — pianistic storm clouds, wind writing suggesting
fantastical plants growing in time-lapse photography, something
resembling a Bach chorale, and then, after an hour, a cathartic flute
melody.The 1974 recording captures perhaps only 60 percent of the
gravitas experienced here live.
Will
there be more of the same? Well, scores at the Slought Foundation show
Eastman using traditional notation in one score, graphic illustrations
in the next. He was always on the move. "Throughout his life, there was a
struggle to find a sense of belonging. … In the exhibition, you can see
how different he looks in pictures," said Hurt.
The
young Eastman could pass for a Bible salesman. But in a somber series
of black-and-white portraits, he has a shaved head and long prophetlike
beard, with bony bare shoulders. Yet these photos, by Andrew Roth, date
from 1980, when Eastman was on the upswing.
His story is that of an unfinished symphony. You don't have the luxury of understanding what's there from the perspective of where it led. Hurt readily refers to Eastman as a creative genius. But will the full range of that genius ever be heard?
Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental continues May 12, 19 and 26 at The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St. Tickets: $12-$25.
Information:267-231-9813.www.ThatWhichIsFundamental.com. Exhibition through May 28 at Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., noon-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, free.
Julius Eastman’s Guerrilla Minimalism
The composer, whose brazen and brilliant music was all but forgotten at century’s end, is finally getting his due.
Eastman, all but forgotten at century’s end, is now seen as a brazen pioneer. Courtesy R. Nemo Hill Collection
Minimalism, the
last great scandal-making revolution in twentieth-century music, has
become venerable. This season, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are being
celebrated worldwide on the occasion of their eightieth birthdays.
(Reich’s was in October; Glass’s is on January 31st.) Arvo Pärt, the
auratic “mystic minimalist” from Estonia, received similar genuflections
when he turned eighty, in 2015. Boxed sets have been issued, academic
conferences organized, books published. Kyle Gann, Keith Potter, and
Pwyll ap Siôn’s “Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and
Postminimalist Music,” the most comprehensive treatment to date, covers
everything from John Adams’s “Harmonielehre” to the electronic drone
pieces of Éliane Radigue.
With the canonization of minimalism has come a reconsideration of its mythology. According to the familiar narrative, a group of composers led by Terry Riley, Reich, and Glass rejected modernist thorniness, opened themselves to pop and non-Western influences, and came home to simple chords and a steady pulse. The reality is more complicated. La Monte Young, whose String Trio of 1958 is widely held to be the starting point of minimalism, steered clear of tonality and maintained an avant-garde posture. A crucial rediscovery of recent years has been the work of Terry Jennings and Dennis Johnson, who joined Young in his early explorations of stripped-down textures. The pianist John Tilbury has made a luminous recording, for the Another Timbre label, of Jennings’s early piano pieces, which are minimalist more in the Samuel Beckett sense—spare, cryptic, suggestive. For the Irritable Hedgehog label, R. Andrew Lee has revived Johnson’s vast 1959 work “November,” in which crystalline sonorities gyrate for five hours.
The major revelation, though, has been the brazen and brilliant music of Julius Eastman, who was all but forgotten at century’s end. Eastman found a degree of fame in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, mainly as a singer: he performed the uproarious role of George III in Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” in the company of Pierre Boulez, and toured with Meredith Monk. He achieved more limited notoriety for works that defiantly affirmed his identity as an African-American and as a gay man. (One was called “Nigger Faggot.”) As the eighties went on, he slipped from view, his behavior increasingly erratic. When he died, in 1990, at the age of forty-nine, months passed before Gann broke the news, in the Village Voice.
These days, Eastman’s name is everywhere. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach have edited an anthology of essays about him, entitled “Gay Guerrilla.” A recording of Eastman’s 1974 piece “Femenine,” on the Frozen Reeds label, has won praise from classical and pop critics alike. The London Contemporary Music Festival staged three days of Eastman concerts in December; Monday Evening Concerts, in Los Angeles, will present an Eastman program on January 23rd; and the Bowerbird ensemble, in Philadelphia, is planning a festival for the spring. Identity politics has probably played a role in the Eastman renaissance: programming a black, gay composer quells questions about diversity. But it’s the music that commands attention: wild, grand, delirious, demonic, an uncontainable personality surging into sound.
With the canonization of minimalism has come a reconsideration of its mythology. According to the familiar narrative, a group of composers led by Terry Riley, Reich, and Glass rejected modernist thorniness, opened themselves to pop and non-Western influences, and came home to simple chords and a steady pulse. The reality is more complicated. La Monte Young, whose String Trio of 1958 is widely held to be the starting point of minimalism, steered clear of tonality and maintained an avant-garde posture. A crucial rediscovery of recent years has been the work of Terry Jennings and Dennis Johnson, who joined Young in his early explorations of stripped-down textures. The pianist John Tilbury has made a luminous recording, for the Another Timbre label, of Jennings’s early piano pieces, which are minimalist more in the Samuel Beckett sense—spare, cryptic, suggestive. For the Irritable Hedgehog label, R. Andrew Lee has revived Johnson’s vast 1959 work “November,” in which crystalline sonorities gyrate for five hours.
The major revelation, though, has been the brazen and brilliant music of Julius Eastman, who was all but forgotten at century’s end. Eastman found a degree of fame in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, mainly as a singer: he performed the uproarious role of George III in Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” in the company of Pierre Boulez, and toured with Meredith Monk. He achieved more limited notoriety for works that defiantly affirmed his identity as an African-American and as a gay man. (One was called “Nigger Faggot.”) As the eighties went on, he slipped from view, his behavior increasingly erratic. When he died, in 1990, at the age of forty-nine, months passed before Gann broke the news, in the Village Voice.
These days, Eastman’s name is everywhere. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach have edited an anthology of essays about him, entitled “Gay Guerrilla.” A recording of Eastman’s 1974 piece “Femenine,” on the Frozen Reeds label, has won praise from classical and pop critics alike. The London Contemporary Music Festival staged three days of Eastman concerts in December; Monday Evening Concerts, in Los Angeles, will present an Eastman program on January 23rd; and the Bowerbird ensemble, in Philadelphia, is planning a festival for the spring. Identity politics has probably played a role in the Eastman renaissance: programming a black, gay composer quells questions about diversity. But it’s the music that commands attention: wild, grand, delirious, demonic, an uncontainable personality surging into sound.
“Gay
Guerrilla” opens with an extended biographical essay, by Packer, that
feels ready for adaptation as a harrowing indie film. Eastman grew up in
Ithaca, New York, singing in boys’ choirs and glee clubs. In his
teen-age years, he showed talent as a pianist, and in 1959 he began
studying at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, one of the country’s
leading music schools. There his interests shifted from piano to
composition. By the end of the sixties, he had joined the Creative
Associates program at the State University of New York at Buffalo,
which, under the direction of Lukas Foss, had become a center of
avant-garde activity.
Eastman first made his name as a creator of
conceptual scores in the vein of John Cage, his incantatory baritone
often serving as a connecting thread. In the same period, he acquired a
taste for provocation. Cage was miffed when, during a rendition of his
“Song Books,” in Buffalo, Eastman invited a young man onstage and
undressed him. This was not the kind of happening that Cage had in mind.
Works in what Eastman called his “Nigger Series” began appearing in the
late seventies, causing immediate discomfort. He might have made more
headway if his tactics had been less confrontational, but, as a
colleague remarked, self-promotion was alien to him. His final years had
the aspect of a deliberate martyrdom, accelerated by alcohol and drugs.
He spent time in homeless shelters and in Tompkins Square Park. The
composer David Borden has suggested that Eastman was “teaching himself
humility on his own terms.”
After Eastman’s death, his manuscripts
were scattered, and some vanished. Only after years of detective work,
led by Leach, has a corpus of scores been assembled. A three-disk set on
the New World label, “Unjust Malaise” (Borden’s anagram of Eastman’s
name), gives a superb overview. As it happens, Paul Tai, who runs New
World, once hired Eastman to work at the old downtown Tower Records.
Minimalism
enabled Eastman’s flowering, but, as Matthew Mendez writes, in “Gay
Guerrilla,” his approach to the genre was “hard to pin down: arch, and
not a little tongue in cheek.” In 1973, Eastman wrote “Stay on It,”
which begins with a syncopated, relentlessly repeated riff and a
falsetto cry of “Stay on it, stay on it.” There’s a hint of disco in the
festive, propulsive sound. But more
dissonant, unruly material intrudes, and several times the piece
dissolves into beatless anarchy. (A good rendition can be found on the
New World set; even better is a dynamic 1974 performance from Glasgow,
available on Vimeo.) “Femenine” extends the mood of “Stay on It” to more
than an hour’s duration, losing wit and variety in the process.
Eastman
perfected his multifarious minimalism in three works of the late
seventies: “Crazy Nigger,” “Evil Nigger,” and “Gay Guerrilla.” There’s a
precious recording of the composer impishly discussing these pieces: in
a dry, professorial tone, he says that he chose the word “nigger”
because it represents “a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that
thing which is superficial or—what can we say?—elegant.” Each work is
scored for multiple instruments of the same kind; Eastman usually
presented them with a quartet of pianos. “Crazy Nigger” begins with a
majestic rumbling of B-flats in the bass. We are thrown into a world
that is as much Romantic as minimalist: the harmony thickens
incrementally; quiet episodes are juxtaposed with thunderous
fortissimos; pentatonic interludes add an angelic sweetness. There is a
sense of worlds forming, of forces gathering.
Classic
minimalist works tend to introduce change by way of horizontal shifts:
Reich’s “phasing” effect, in which instruments playing the same music
slip out of synch with one another; Glass’s “additive” process, in which
notes are added to a repeating pattern. Eastman’s method, by contrast,
is vertical. He keeps piling on elements, so that an initially consonant
texture turns discordant and competing rhythmic patterns build to a
blur. New ideas appear out of nowhere: “Evil Nigger” becomes fixated on a
minor-key figure, in falling fourths, that resembles the opening motif
of Mahler’s First Symphony, and “Gay Guerrilla” hammers away at the
Lutheran hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” beloved of Bach.
Furthermore, players are given some freedom in realizing the score,
their parts taking the form of structured improvisations. This exuberant
chaos is far removed from the deadpan cool of Reich and Glass.
Throughout,
Eastman upends the narrative of minimalist restoration—of the triumph
of simplicity. Indeed, “Evil Nigger” runs the story in reverse, ending
in spaced-out atonality. Surviving scores and recorded improvisations
from his final decade revisit that zone frequently. (A tape of a
volcanic 1980 piano-and-voice performance has surfaced; hopefully, it
will be released.) Something about this music can’t be fixed in place,
and recordings are a pale echo of the live experience. In the closing
minutes of “Crazy Nigger,” additional pianists emerge from the audience
and join the players onstage, to assist in the unfolding of a clangorous
overtone series. The collapse of the wall between performers and
onlookers feels like the start of an uprising. This is the point at
which Eastman’s music becomes absolutely, ferociously political. For a
moment, it seems poised to bring the system down. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the January 23, 2017, issue, with the headline “Guerrilla Minimalism.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alex Ross has been the music critic at The New Yorker
since 1996. He writes about classical music, covering the field from the
Metropolitan Opera to the contemporary avant-garde, and has also
contributed essays on literature, history, the visual arts, film, and
ecology. His first book, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,” a cultural history of music since 1900, won a National Book Critics Circle award and the Guardian First Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second book, the essay collection “Listen to This,” won an ASCAP-Deems
Taylor Award. He is now at work on “Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of
Music,” an account of the composer’s vast cultural impact. He has
received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Arts
and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
https://www.indiewire.com/2014/05/consider-the-mysterious-life-death-of-african-american-composer-pianist-julius-eastman-for-your-next-film-project-235661/
Consider The Mysterious Life & Death Of African American Composer, Pianist Julius Eastman For Your Next Film Project
Channeling Julius Eastman, a Gay, African American Composer
Composer Julius Eastman is the focus of a project by the Otolith Group and it was included in this year’s Sharjah Biennial.
SHARJAH, UAE — “There are of course 99 names of Allah, but there are 52 niggers. So therefore, I will be playing two of these niggers.” This is what Julius Eastman said during his introduction to the Northwestern University audience at a concert in June of 1980, and it is repeated in the Otolith Group‘s piece “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017), presented at this year’s Sharjah Biennial.
During the video, that lasts 50 minutes, two performers (a black man, Dante Micheaux, and a black woman, Elaine Mitchener) recite the entire statement. It is a riveting recitation by both actors, whose deliveries are very different. Micheaux, who performs at the beginning of the video, is calm and matter of fact in his approach, while Mitchener at certain points wails, as if begging the audience to hear and understand the import of what she says. After the actors’ declamation the pianists play — four pianists at two pianos bring “Evil Nigger,” “Gay Guerrilla,” and “Crazy Nigger,” to life. The appearance of the four pianists provide an odd visual contrast: they are all white and their faces are marked with abstract shapes contrived with silver makeup. The combination of the extraordinary visuals and the minimalist music of Eastman — an avant-garde, black, gay composer of music that sounds otherwordly — keeps me in my seat with no sense of time passing.
Joy Boy by Julius Eastman& Unearthed by Frozen Reeds in 2017, this recording of Eastman’s queer-themed Joy Boy was performed by the S.E.M. ensemble, at the same concert as his well sought out Femenine. The piece consists of staccato reed and a vocal quartet that work together, in ways that are simultaneously obtuse and harmonious. The voices are strange and unwavering, further complimented by an incidental noise from shuffling audience members and chesty coughs. The naked tempestuousness of this piece can give the listener the illusion of knowing more about Eastman than is actually possible. The piece is so riddled with imperfection yet in total somehow it translates to the polar opposite. A demonstration of just how rash the human voice can be.
Julius Eastman - Femenine (1974)
This 2016 release of a 1974 Eastman performance offers a completely new perspective on his body of work. Femenine is one of a select few ways by which you can actually experience Eastman as a performer. According to many he’d always been an eccentric presence. In one instance Mary Jane Leach described him as having turned up to a choir performance dressed in leather and chains. His overt queerness, pushed Eastman away from the strictly hetero world of classical. Even the quietly queer John Cage was said to be repulsed by explicit, homoerotic reframing of his own Song Books by S.E.M. Ensemble, during which Eastman stripped male singers naked on stage.
The title of Femenine, is the first overt reference Eastman makes to gender nonconformity. While a reference to the reality of being effeminate in 70s New York is bold in itself, the piece yields something just as subversive.
In many ways it is a sister composition not only to Masculine but to Stay On It too. It shares the same buoyant vibrancy and general infectiousness. Beginning with machine controlled sleigh bells that perpetuate through the 72 minute duration, Femmine is testament to both Eastman’s sense of humour and derision of his contemporaries. This machine programmed instrument almost seems to satirise the almost industrial performance that can turn many off from the contemporary classical music of that time.
Julius Eastman - Evil N*gger (1979)
This is a part of a self-titled series, which were a collection of pieces written in the late 70s and early 80s. The pieces, and this one in particular, characterises the identity politics of his music. It’s a challenge not only to the musical politics of New York’s avant-garde, which is often documented as bigoted but also a challenge to its social politics. And Evil N*gger is one of Eastman’s loudest statements. Not only a reclamation of the slur in its title, it is formally bold and provocative with an integrally defiant and restless energy. This power is created through an evocative dark piano composition and is profoundly epic in the most acute way possible. Minimalism is often accused of being devoid of passion and emotion but this is not something that can be levelled at the work of Eastman.
Julius Eastman- Gay Guerrilla (1980)
The worlds of contemporary classical and (for the most part) the avant-garde in the 70s and 80s, weren't the most accommodating of scenes for the person of colour or the queer alike. The miasmic entrenchment of the classical and traditional rung true then, just as many say it does it does now. As the militant queer dichotomy Gay Guerrilla is combative of this, and it is far from timid in what it’s trying to say.
Beginning in lonely stuttering notes, slowly unraveling into defiant crescendos, before the final part repurposes Martin Luther’s A Mighty Fortress Is Our God into a queer manifesto. Gay Guerrilla exposes the very best aspects of Eastman as a composer and social commentator. And while racial and sexual politics inform Eastman’s work greatly, they certainly don’t define them. He expresses feeling in its coldest and most naked form. Understanding this begins with the acknowledgment that Eastman is a black gay man. Gay Guerilla is one of the most moving pieces ever to be written for eight hands. Propulsive – it’s a bombastic tragedy, and a deeply saddening one.
Meredith Monk-Dolmen Music (1981)
Luminaries to one another, the artistic connection between Eastman and Meredith Monk was long and meaningful. While Eastman provides the foreboding organ on the opener to what many consider Monk’s opus Turtle Dreams, his monastic vocals on Dolmen Music’s final piece is their greatest collaboration. Monk’s explorations of human vocal texture enamoured Eastman more than that of any other contemporary composer. And when you look at what he tries to achieve with his own music, the connection becomes quite obvious.
Dolmen Music traverses the complexities of the masculine and the feminine through means of voice. And the climax of this record sees them combine forces harmoniously. While it would certainly be a stretch to call Eastman a gender abolitionist, with the little information we actually have about him, his work does seem intent on destroying binaries as much as possible.
Dolmen Music was later sampled by DJ Shadow on Endtroducing thus forging a tenuous bridge between Eastman and the mainstream.
Dinosaur L - 24→24 Music (1981)
Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell are not too dissimilar. It’s easy to categorise both as under-appreciated queer icons who died way too early. Both were never credited with the acclaim they deserved. Their music can be something of a hotspot for queer tourist record collectors alike. What better way to support the cause then buying into Russell who died of AIDS in 1992? That’s not to discredit straight people who love Arthur Russell - his music is about much more than being gay - but records like World Of Echo in particular will always be a sacred part of queer musical history. And revisionist history can often leave that aspect out thus erasing queer narratives.
If Arthur Russell’s lyrics encapsulate being gay in the 80s then Eastman’s instrumentals score it. Julius Eastman conducted a large amount of Russell’s orchestral recordings , but their most notable convergence comes in the world of disco arguably one of the first genre subcultures to be a somewhat LGBT safe space.
Eastman plays organ and provides baritone backing on Dinosaur L’s 24→24 Music, which is probably the biggest floor filling record for Eastman, if not Russell. At times awkwardly programmed beats, cartoonish vocals, a no wave aesthetic and lyrics like “You’re gonna be clean on your bean”, make it hard to understand. 24→24 Music is the weirdest outlier in Eastman’s Career.
Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner (2013)
One aspect of Eastman’s personality that’s often underestimated is his sense of humour. Even though he wasn't shy of tackling grave issues this wasn't a constant thing for him. In the excellent documentary Without A Net Renee Levine Packer describes him as “very funny but also very serious. Very serious and grave at his core even though he’d assume [resemblance] of someone who was very relaxed.” The Jace Clayton 2013 live tribute to Eastman is testament to this. As well as performing many of his pieces the show envisages a world in which Julius Eastman is a coffee table composer and household name through vignette and parody. In one instance Clayton Skype interviews Arooj Aftab for the role of Julius Eastman Impersonator.
Kukuruz Quartet - Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations (2018)
Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations by Kukuruz Quartet
The new and justified resurgence in interest in Eastman’s music over the past few years has meant that reinterpretations of his work have become an inevitability. Kurukuz Quartet connect themselves with Eastman in 2014 where they performed his music to standing ovations in Athens. Last year the Zürich ensemble rendered four of Eastman’s finest piano pieces for CD release. Fugue no. 7, Evil N*gger, Buddha and Gay Guerrilla.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/02/05/julius-eastman-music
Resurrecting The Political, Avant-Garde Music Of Julius Eastman
VIDEO: 9:52
Editor's Note: This segment contains audio that some listeners may find disturbing or offensive.
Composer
Julius Eastman died homeless in 1990. Just 49 years old, he represented
a promising future in avant-garde, minimalist classical music. As a
black, openly gay man, he stood out from his largely white peers. He
wrote challenging, political music with provocative titles. Much of that
work was lost after he died, but historians have been piecing it back
together.
Here & Now's Robin Young speaks with Tiona Nekkia McClodden, co-curator of the new exhibit "Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental," now on view at The Kitchen gallery in New York.
Interview Highlights
On who Julius Eastman was
"Julius
was a product of a family that had a piano in the house. And an older
brother to a younger brother who later in his life went on to a jazz
background. But Julius, you know, he learned to play piano by ear
around, like, 3, and from there was given an opportunity to have a
personal teacher."
On his time at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia
"Definitely
not a lot of black students at Curtis Music Institute, which, because
of — Curtis Music Institute, at the time, didn't have a proper campus,
so the students would come in and they would be placed with families. No
one would take Julius, so he actually had to stay at the local YMCA
during his entire run there."
On his piece "Femenine"
"It
slowly builds. He had this idea around organic music and music that
progressed over time. So a lot of his work is durational in form, and
this particular piece, we're looking at well over an hour and it just
slowly, gradually changes and changes and changes. To listen to it, you
kind of go through a lot of different pain thresholds to come out to the
end. But it's a stunning piece. It's one of my favorite pieces of his."
On his performance of Peter Maxwell Davies' "Eight Songs for a Mad King," and whether he was mad
"I
think he was definitely affected by a lot of things of the time. I will
say, for instance, Julius went into Attica [Correctional Facility],
after the Attica uprisings, at the prison in upstate New York, and
performed several times. So he was affected and was well aware about
these different things that were happening at this time and how that
would manifest in regards to his person, primarily as a black man in a
predominately white space. So I think there's a part that is, there's
madness — or mad — but then there's also this element of like, you know,
him just moving through things and wanting to be free of a lot of the
traditional standards of what you would think a person would desire."
On how "Evil Nigger," one of his most controversial series, was received
"Pretty
rough, the first presentation. The black student union completely tried
to stage a protest which led to the prompt of him actually doing the
introduction that precedes 'Crazy Nigger,' where he talks about his
conceptual framework behind the actual piece, in dealing with labor,
capitalism in this country and black bodies. It's something that over
time has been something that people shy away from because it is one of
the works that, actually, we do have a score for. But at other times you
have people kind of really exploiting and pushing that to the forefront
without acknowledging the conceptual framework behind it."
On his living conditions near the end of his life, and how homelessness, drugs and alcohol may have factored in
"If
you take into consideration, I think the downtown scene, I think he got
swooped up in a lot of the elements, so I wouldn't say it's entirely
one over the other. We have one of the last interviews with him featured
in the actual exhibition, where he talks about liking to be homeless
and liking to give his money away to homeless people — because he
actually made money up until his death — and liking to be a free spirit
that wandered around. So there's part of it that is part of the system
of how people received him and related with him, but the way that he
moved with music was just with full force."
On why his music is being resurrected right now
"For
me, I was very interested in the fact of how someone could be obscured
or taken off the map, so my whole interest in Julius' legacy is to make
sure his personhood isn't separated from his music. Because the music is
being resurrected, played, exploited in all different forms, but I
think there has been a severe neglect on his personhood."
On what people should listen for with his music
"I
think you just have to sit through it and quiet yourself and listen to
his music — after a while you can notice the changes. It has a very
haptic feel to it, so it actually shifts the way your body feels. So I
usually tell people to give it a shot, play it and just feel the
changes, and so then you can get an understanding of what I think he was
working at."
This segment aired on February 5, 2018.
https://www.thatwhichisfundamental.com/about
bowerbird presents
Julius Eastman:
That Which Is Fundamental
Curated by Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Dustin Hurt
presented in conjunction with the Eastman Estate, and in collaboration with Slought and The Rotunda
That Which Is Fundamental is the first comprehensive examination of Eastman's legacy to work alongside the Eastman Estate, an organization led by Gerry Eastman to gather together, organize, preserve, disseminate, and generally further the work of his brother, Julius.
Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental is a project of Bowerbird, a Philadelphia based non profit dedicated to presenting experimental music and related art forms. For more info visit: www.bowerbird.org
listen to julius eastman
julius eastman: experimental intermedia excerpt
julius eastman: prelude joan d'arc excerpt
Mary Jane Leach on Julius Eastman's Prelude Joan D'Arc
Creating a monophonic composition seems as though
it should be easy to do, unless you’re a composer and are aware of the
pitfalls that await you. Are you writing to showcase your musical ideas?
Writing to showcase a performer? Exploiting an instrument to its
extremes? Showcasing its beautiful sound? You can err on the side of
simplicity, or complexity. Are you trying to overwhelm or soothe? So
many issues, made so much more difficult with that one note at a time
restriction.
I will be writing about Julius Eastman’s Prelude
to Joan d’Arc (Prelude) for solo voice, which he created and performed,
how it relates to his body of work, and showing some of the influences
that went into it.
Starting approximately in the 1970s, the
composer-performer began to re-emerge (with the exception of composers
who were pianists, and who had continued their dual roles), after too
many years of separation, and many composers began to write music for
themselves to perform. This came about because of music that they wanted
to write and/or perform, as well as for expediency. It is much easier
to book and pay for a solo concert than one that needs rehearsal time
and has to pay other musicians. It also bypasses having to wait for
someone else to perform your music.
In his article The Composer as Weakling, Julius Eastman (1940-90) wrote about “the poor relationship between composer and instrumentalist, and the puny state of the contemporary composer in the classical music world. If we make a survey of classical music programming or look at the curriculum and attitudes in our conservatories, we would be led to believe that today’s instrumentalist lacks imagination, scholarship, a modicum of curiosity; or we would be led to believe that music was born in 1700, lived a full life until 1850 at which time music caught an incurable disease and finally died in 1900.” 1
Eastman certainly didn’t lack scholarship, having graduated from the Curtis Institute with a degree in composition. And he most certainly did not lack imagination or curiosity. He was both a composer and a gifted vocalist and pianist. In addition to his own compositions, he performed a wide variety of music. Best known for his performance of Peter Maxwell-Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, one of the most demanding vocal parts in twentieth-century music, he also performed music from all periods, from Bach to Haydn to Richard Strauss to [Gian Carlo] Menotti and [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, often under the baton of famous conductors such as Lukas Foss, Pierre Boulez, and Zubin Mehta. He was also familiar with jazz and improvisation, at times performing with his brother Gerry, a bassist with the Count Basie Band, among other groups. His compositions evince the culmination of the wide variety of music that he was exposed to, creating music that is indisputably and uniquely his own.
Writing authoritatively about Eastman is somewhat precarious, as much of his work, both scores and recordings, were lost when he was evicted from his East Village apartment in New York City in 1983 or 84. The sheriff had dumped his possessions onto the street, with Eastman making no effort to recover any of his music. Various friends, upon hearing this, tried to salvage as much as they could, but most was lost. So inferences have to be drawn from the few scores and recordings that do exist, coupled with concert reviews and recollections of people involved in these events, some of which contradict each other.
Eastman’s earliest works, from his Curtis days
were primarily for piano, or piano and voice, and had fairly traditional
titles (Sonata, Birds Fly Away, I Love the River, Piano Piece I-IV) as
well as a few with somewhat provocative titles (Insect Sonata and The
Blood). He became a member of the Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo in
1969, a group of virtuoso performers who performed music by many of the
most important living composers. He began to write pieces with an
expanded instrumentation, adding electronics at times, and with titles
that became more provocative (Touch Him When, Five Gay Songs, Joy Boy).
He moved to New York in 1976 and I have a feeling that, once he left Buffalo, he didn't have access to the same kind of ready group of musicians to perform his work. So, he began to create pieces that he could perform solo, either on piano or as a vocalist. He had two solo concerts in New York that year: one at Environ, Praise God From Whom All Devils Grow, which was reviewed, and another at Experimental Intermedia Foundation, for which there was a recording. Both concerts were improvisational in nature.
In his review of the Environ concert, Tom Johnson noted that “There are probably more composers-performers today than ever before. Many composers have had traditional performing skills, but people like Paganini and Rachmaninoff, whose music really depended on their performance abilities, have been rare….But of course, there are also purely artistic reasons why musicians sometimes prefer to write for themselves instead of for other performers. In some cases composers really seem to find themselves once they begin looking inside their own voices and instruments, and come up with strong personal statements that never quite came through as long as the were creating music for others to play.” He went on to note that Eastman played piano in a “high-energy, free-jazz style,” and sang in a “crazed baritone.” 2 Joseph Horowitz also noted that the singing was “often demonic.” 3 It seems that he usually didn’t combine voice and piano in these concerts, and that his piano playing tended more towards free jazz, while his vocal solos were more minimal and in the style of Avant-Garde classical music.
Listening to his Experimental Intermedia concert, which was primarily solo voice, the singing was fairly ornate and melismatic. At times it even seemed medieval, especially Spanish medieval music, with rhythms being tapped out in that style. Although he had used extended vocal techniques in earlier pieces, such as Macle, written in 1971, this singing is fairly straightforward.
His use of text in the Experimental Intermedia concert, source unknown, is very interesting and reminiscent of Gertrude Stein. For the first 2:20, only four words are sung “To know the difference,” usually in groups of one or two words. Gradually, words are added, usually one at a time, so that by 4:42 sixteen words are being sung in various combinations “To know the difference between the one without another. But he is the one behind the zero. To know the difference between the one and the zero.” By 6:28 twenty-four words are being sung, adding: “Be known to you and to me that the one is after zero and his place is one. His place is behind the zero. His name is one.”
The work of Gertrude Stein was very well known in the circles that Eastman was part of. She wrote in a repetitive style, using a limited vocabulary, as in the example below.
He had been nicely faithful. In being one he was one who had he been one continuing would not have been one continuing being nicely faithful. He was one continuing, he was not continuing to be nicely faithful. In continuing he was being one being the one who was saying good good, excellent but in continuing he was needing that he was believing that he was aspiring to be one continuing to be able to be saying good good, excellent. He had been one saying good good, excellent. He had been that one. 4
Eastman had worked with Petr Kotik in the SEM Ensemble from 1969-75. Kotik wrote Many, Many Women, using text by Stein, and which Eastman performed in at various stages of its development. He also had met and performed with Virgil Thomson, who had written two operas using texts by Stein. And, one of his close collaborators, the choreographer Andrew deGroat, for whom Eastman wrote The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (Joan), was a big fan of Stein. Besides having their use of repetition in common, Stein was searching for the “bottom nature” 5 of her characters, while Eastman was searching for “that which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness.” 6 They were both gay.
Eastman’s Praise God From Whom All Devils Grow concert at Environ, which made a profane interpretation of the hymn Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow, is his first instance of an overt reference to a religious text, although in a transgressive way. On the other hand, his Experimental Intermedia concert, while it had no overt religious references, juxtaposed super-8 film showing dog shit and close-ups of a drag queen, displaying in your face sexuality and depravity.
By 1978 Eastman, who was black and flamboyantly gay, was composing pieces that were part of a “Nigger” series of works, Nigger Faggot (NF) and Dirty Nigger, both for chamber ensemble, as well as Crazy Nigger, for multiples of one instrument, but usually performed on pianos. It was the first of a trio of pieces usually performed on four pianos. The other two pieces, Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla, were written in 1979. Although their titles are provocative, the music isn’t, and they are probably the pieces that sealed Eastman’s reputation as an excellent composer.
So there was this duality going on in Eastman’s work – provocative titles, texts, and multi-media paired with ecstatic music. Gradually actual religious texts began to be used by Eastman, and at least by spring of 1980 he was improvising using religious texts, with titles such as Humanity and the Four Books of Confucious. He was a spiritual person and used texts from many religions.
In 1981 he wrote Joan, scored for ten cellos, that was paired with de Groat’s dance Gravy, which was presented at The Kitchen in New York. It is a vital, through-written, and dense piece full of rhythm and many melodies. Eastman had heard and was inspired by Patti Smith’s Rock N Roll Nigger, and he used that opening rhythm in Joan, using it throughout much of the piece.
In the early 1980s, the Creative Music Foundation received a grant to make three radio programs featuring three composers. Eastman was chosen to be one of these composers, and Joan was recorded at the Third Street Music School Settlement with ten freelance cellists, in a barely rehearsed and quickly recorded session. Steve Cellum was the recording engineer, and he remembers that a couple of weeks after the session, while trying to choose which take to use, Eastman casually mentioned that he wanted to record a vocal introduction, something that hadn’t been mentioned before then. So Cellum lugged his equipment up to Eastman’s tiny East Village apartment, which was not a very good recording situation, but is how Prelude came to be recorded. As far as I know, it was never performed with a live performance of Joan. I had always assumed that it was added in order to fulfill a time requirement for the radio program, but it turns out that there was no such requirement. Also recorded was a spoken introduction, which was the program notes from the Kitchen performance:
Dear Joan,
Find presented a work of art, in your name, full of honor, integrity, and boundless courage. This work of art, like all works of art in your name, can never and will never match your most inspired passion. These works of art are like so many insignificant pebbles at your precious feet. But I offer it none the less. I offer it as a reminder to those who think that they can destroy liberators by acts of treachery, malice, and murder. They forget that the mind has memory. They forget that Good Character is the foundation of all acts. They think that no one sees the corruption of their deeds, and like all organizations (especially governments and religious organizations), they oppress in order to perpetuate themselves. Their methods of oppression are legion, but when they find that their more subtle methods are failing, they resort to murder. Even now in my own country, my own people, my own time, gross oppression and murder still continue. Therefore I take your name and meditate upon it, but not as much as I should.
Dear Joan,
When meditating on your name I am given strength and dedication. Dear Joan I have dedicated myself to the liberation of my own person firstly. I shall emancipate myself from the materialistic dreams of my parents; I shall emancipate myself from the bind of the past and the present; I shall emancipate myself from myself.
Dear Joan,
There is not much more to say except Thank You. And please accept this work of art, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, as a sincere act of love and devotion.
Yours with love,
Julius Eastman
One Dedicated to Emancipation
As verbose as the spoken introduction is, the Prelude is the opposite. It is 11:45, but only uses fifteen words, three of which are only used once.
Saint Michael said
Saint Margaret said
Saint Catherine said
They said
He said
She said
Joan
Speak Boldly
When they question you [used only once]
The three saints mentioned are the ones that Joan of Arc claimed to hear, and who counseled her to speak boldly at her trial for heresy.
Even more minimal than the text is the musical material: consisting almost exclusively of descending notes in a minor chord, a minor rising third, and alternating minor seconds. I was shocked when I realized this, as the piece is so engrossing, that you don’t notice how little is happening musically. There really is no musical development, no compositional sleight of hand, and the words are repetitious. Just plain singing, no extended techniques, no ornamentation. There is the voice, though, and the conviction behind it, the meditation on Joan of Arc, that draws you in. It is probably Eastman’s most minimal work, pared of any excess, and it is ironic that it is paired with Joan, which is probably the most through-written piece of his, and with as dense a texture as Prelude is bare.
Only the first page of the score for Joan exists,
which was printed in the program for the Kitchen performances. For many
composers of that time, there was a lot of verbal performance practice
in effect, with many of a piece’s instructions delivered verbally and
not specifically notated in the score, as well as employing a kind of
shorthand notation that might have made sense in the context of the
moment, but can seem baffling years later. Most of Eastman’s pieces are
like this. Joan, though, because it involved so many performers, and
usually in situations with little rehearsal time, had to be written out.
Eastman had an unforgettable personality, but the cellists that he
worked with had so little contact with him that most of them barely
remember him, unlike almost everyone else who ever came into contact
with him.
Many of us in those days (1970s and 80s) would
agree to do a concert, and realize a few days before the concert, that
we didn’t have enough material, so it was a not uncommon practice to do a
structured improvisation to fill out the concert. Although Eastman
didn’t need to stretch out the length of the recording, I envision him
using this same process, of preparing for a structured improvisation,
before recording Prelude, selecting the text he wanted to use, and an
idea of what he wanted to do musically. Usually the tension of
performing in front of an audience tightens one’s focus and brings an
energy to a performance that cannot be recreated in a rehearsal. That
Eastman was able to do so much with so little, in a small, noisy
apartment,and with no audience is amazing.
Eastman assimilated many of his wealth of
influences, including composers from the past. I cannot know for sure if
he was familiar with the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, but there are at
least a couple of synchronicities between their work. Meyerbeer used the
Lutheran hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God in the overture to Les
Huguenots, while Eastman used the hymn in Gay Guerrilla. In Robert le
Diable, Meyerbeer has Bertram, a disciple of Satan, singing to the
ghosts of sinful nuns. His solo is very similar to the beginning of
Prelude, in which Eastman is channeling Joan’s conversations with her
three saints – they have the same first three notes, with Betram
continuing down to the next note in the chord. Fantasy perhaps, but the
musical similarity is striking, and the contrast in characters, saint
and sinners, even more so.
Eastman continues in his article on composer/performers:
If we look closely before 1750, we will
notice that composer/instrumentalist were one and the same whether
employed by the church, the aristocracy, or self-employed (Troubadours).
At the beginning of the age of virtuosity,
beginning with the life of Paganini, we see the splitting of the egg
into two parts, one part instrumentalist, one composer. At this time we
also notice the rise of the solo performer, the ever increasing size of
the orchestra, the ascendance of the conductor, and the recedence of the
composer from active participation in the musical life of his
community, into the role of the unattended queen bee, constantly
birthing music in his lonely room, awaiting the knock of an
instrumentalist, conductor, or lastly, an older composer who has gained
some measure of power. These descending angels would not only have to
knock, but would also have to open the door, because the composer had
become so weak from his isolated and torpid condition. Finally, the
composer would be borne aloft on the back of one of the three
descendants, into a life of ecstasy, fame, and fortune.
This being the case, it is the composer’s
task to reassert him/herself as an active part of the musical community,
because it was the composer who must reestablish himself as a vital
part of the musical life of his/her community.
The composer is therefore enjoined to
accomplish the following: she must establish himself as a major
instrumentalist, he must not wait upon a descending being, and she must
become an interpreter, not only of her own music and career, but also
the music of her contemporaries, and give a fresh new view of the known
and unknown classics.
Today’s composer, because of his
problematical historical inheritance, has become totally isolated and
self-absorbed. Those composers who have gained some measure of success
through isolation and self-absorption will find that outside of the loft
door the state of the composer in general and their state in particular
is still as ineffectual as ever. The composer must become the total
musician, not only a composer. To be only a composer is not enough. 7
Eastman was the embodiment of a
composer/performer, one who could construct a dense piece full of
counterpoint, such as Joan, and then create Prelude, using so little
material that you wonder how it can hold together and work, but through
the strength of his performance, he made it work, discovering what was
indeed fundamental by discarding the superficial. 8
-Mary Jane Leach
Composer bojan vuletic listens to julius eastman
Bojan Vuletic has been like a brother to me for
the past 10 years. We've shared a lot of musical and non-musical joys
and struggles, long conversations and short mental battles. I have
performed his music since the day we met and have always found his
understanding of the technical mastery of the act of composing to be
second only to his desire to represent very real emotional content.
Bojan was in New York to premiere one of his new
works: part of his Recomposing Art series, and I used the chance to
include someone with a very non-American perspective in the
conversation. I consider him a master of the mechanics of thought and
emotion. Because of this, I wanted to give him a piece that he would
have a hard time placing in a context, so that there would be little
historical or technical footing for him to work with. It wasn't until
after he'd heard the Prelude that he was given a biography of Julius
Eastman.
Nate Wooley: First of all, what’s your general impression? You’ve never heard any Julius Eastman before?
Bojan Vuletic: No.
NW: What are your first thoughts, before I start giving you any information?
BV: Obviously it was clergical in some sense. As there are no instruments accompanying the singing, and it feels like it has some kind of calling it is clear to me that it could be performed in a church. I guess that’s where the musical language comes from.
NW: Do you think that’s why he used monophony?
BV: Yes, that’s apparent, I think.
NW: Now that you’ve seen that he was an African-American composer, I’ll tell you a little bit more about him. He worked mostly in the 1970s. As you noticed from the titles of some of his other pieces, there’s a political element there…some of the titles could be a bit shocking, I guess. With that knowledge, what do you think of the content of the opening. Does it take on a different quality to you?
BV: Of course, yes. If that piece had been sung by a priest, this wouldn’t appeal to me. I think there is definitely some kind of contradiction in the performance. It’s the composer singing right? So, it’s what’s in his head. It’s a little bit over the top from the very first moment; more than you would need to to have your voice be heard in a church, so there’s something to that. And, I think if he composed these other pieces with provocative names, there is probably a political statement.
NW: Did you feel that it was a liturgical sounding piece based on the musical choices and also the fact that he’s invoking the names of saints or by the way he was singing? What part of the way that he sang it played into the way you perceived it?
BV: There was a strangeness before I had any information, because I was actually expecting it to erupt in some ways. And, there were two or three moments where it went somewhere else: one being where he sang the ½ steps.
At the beginning, I thought, “oh, he’ll deconstruct all this”. But, hearing the whole piece I would say…just me, being a non-native speaker,…”St. whatever said”…said in the sense of told [spoke], right?
NW: Yes.
BV: It was like an endless train in a sense, so it could have been St. George said [that] St. Peter said [that], etc. It could be read in that way. But now I think it’s more like whoever is calling, no one is answering (laughs)
NW: Or that he’s not going to reveal what they said.
BV: Well, that could be another thing. In that sense I thought it was; well this is guesswork, but for me when you look at the language of the church, it’s a sort of code. It took a lot of time before the mass was read in the language that the people lived..it was read in Latin, so that was a kind of a code. In this context, that was an association I had. The church is calling you, naming names, but not telling you what it is.
NW: Do you feel like you miss harmony at all in this piece?
BV: No.
NW: What role do you think harmony plays in this composition?
BV: It’s clear he’s suggesting the harmony with the melody, and it’s mostly ostinato figures, so it’s very clear the way it’s structured. There is a thing that he did move sometimes with his voice down a minor second, but not in a completely clear way, so it could either be an intonation thing or it give it a little twist. It has a feeling like a naïve painting approach to me; very clear colors; very simple. But then there’s a twist to it somehow.
NW: But also it seems to me that in naïve painting that there’s a certain kind of expression that comes from the simplicity of it. This is one of the thigns that you’re not getting as part of the project is that this is a prologue to another piece. That pieces is a cello octet that’s more dense.
BV: So the prologue is monophonic and then the piece is dense? That makes sense.
NW: Did you have a different feeling about it when you found out more about him?
BV: For me, the piece didn’t have a connection to what I would think of as African-American musical culture, so it was a surprise to find out he was African-American There were two things that are actually out of a different cultural context, but I had an association with [when listening to this piece]. I had one project called Polyphonie and it was about the hidden treasures that are present, musically, in people from other cultures living in Germany. I did a lot of exploring there and it was pretty interesting. One [of the participants] was a Jewish cantor singing a capella and it sounded nearly like a contemporary piece. Since I didn’t understand what he was saying, I was just looking for musical structures. I could see it had a strong complexity. When I talked to him and figured out what he was doing, I realized it actually had very simply structures behind it. In this context, I find that idea very interesting because [Eastman] is laying out the structure very clearly. So, when you say it’s a prologue to something else, I feel like this becomes the key to what comes after.
NW: I think with Eastman, too, his other music is loosely aligned (in my head at least) with minimalism like Steve Reich/Philip Glass…there’s complexity, but the structure is very clear.
BV: But the big difference between this and a Philip Glass piece is, there seems to be a concert hall attitude to the Glass vocal pieces I’ve heard, which this piece doesn’t have at all. I think if it had that attitude I couldn’t listen to it. I wouldn’t be able to stand it I think. I think it’s very interesting that it’s the composer singing this. I think if it was a repertoire piece for a concert hall, I would hate it probably (laughs)
NW: Well, he’s very heavily classically trained
BV: Yeah, but it’s not obvious, he’s not showing off. It’s funny as well, because I expected this arc, especially with monophonic music I expect a large arc, but he starts very hot and only at the end does he have this deep dynamic fall to almost whispering. It’s a very interesting and strange structure.
http://www.artnews.com/2018/02/07/speak-boldly-question-kitchen-moving-multifarious-tribute-composer-julius-eastman/
‘Speak Boldly When They Question You’: At the Kitchen, a Moving and Multifarious Tribute to Composer Julius Eastman
A performance of Julius Eastman’s Crazy Nigger (1979) at the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, on January 28. THE KITCHEN
It is not even the second week of February, but the Kitchen’s festival for the late, great composer Julius Eastman, “That Which Is Fundamental,” has already firmly secured a spot as one of highlights of 2018 in New York. A string of exhilarating performances, all sold out, have concluded, but a treasure box of an exhibition of Eastman’s archival materials remains on view through this Saturday at the Chelsea alternative space alongside a moving show, inspired by the artist’s work, of contemporary art, including pieces by Sondra Perry, Carolyn Lazard, and Chloë Bass. Recordings of the long-neglected musician’s work have trickled online, and there are records available, too, plus a book. If you are not yet a fan of Eastman, who died in 1990, at the age of 49, now is the time to become one.
Many of Eastman’s compositions are ingenious studies in repetition and endurance, plumbing the effects they can generate on a spectrum ranging from the sublime to the monstrous. His works churn and metamorphose slowly—and sometimes violently. His compositions are about how minute ideas and groups of individual players can clash and battle, then come together and yield outside returns. In this way, they have links to contemporaneous creations like the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, the hand-fashioned nets of Eva Hesse, the blurred abstract paintings of Jack Whitten, David Diao, and Gerhard Richter, and the “Wave” paintings of Lee Lozano. These are all works in which thrilling surprises emerge from relentless repetition. They gallantly engage with chance and improvisation in ways that can evince vulnerability and trauma.
At the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, on January 28, four players, each at their own piano, hit the keys rapid-fire, building waves of sound as they traded a recurring motif amongst themselves. This was the 1979 work Evil Nigger (1979), and it was, at most moments, amazingly formidable: pure power resounded through that huge warehouse space. But then it would turn precarious, even fragile, as the pianos went in disparate, dissonant directions. When that happened, Joseph Kubera, one of the four players, would shout “1–2–3–4!,” then he and the others—Dynasty Battles, Michelle Cann, and Adam Tender—would be at it again, united, charging deeper into the piece, like a metal version of Flight of the Bumblebee improbably written for piano. The audience, sitting on all four sides of the musicians, rewarded their virtuosic 20-minute performance with thunderous applause.
On February 3, at the Kitchen, ten cellists sliced away at The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (1981), a gorgeous melody working its way through a wall of notes, and Trumpet (1970),
for which seven players on that instrument squealed in the cacophonous
and majestic manner of a good, functioning democracy before retreating
to an unlikely peace.
Eastman
THE KITCHEN
Eastman was raised in
Ithaca, New York, and “one of the foundations of our family was that
everybody had a piano—all of our grandparents had pianos, there was a
piano in my house when I grew up,” his older brother, Gerry Eastman,
told the Kitchen on January 27, before performing an improvisation in
honor of Julius on guitar with his quartet. “My mother bought my brother
a seven-foot grand piano, which I still have in my loft today, when she
found out he had some talent.” He listened to Julius play throughout
their youth, and, he said, “I never heard a piano player that sounded
better than him.”
The tragic stretches of Julius’s life and work have been
regularly repeated in stories about his posthumous revival, Gerry said.
Many of his scores have been lost. Some others survive only partially,
and a few works in the festival, which was organized by Tiona Nekkia
McClodden and Dustin Hurt, of Bowerbird, the Philadelphia organization
that presented the it last year, were reconstructed by admirers. Late in
his life, he may have been mentally ill and was homeless for a period.
But people should also know, Gerry said, that his brother
could be the life of the party. During the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s in
Buffalo (where he settled after attending Curtis in Philadelphia), New
York (he performed at the Kitchen), and abroad, he was a key member of
the vanguard music community. In a line that is often quoted, Julius
once said, “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the
fullest—Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a
homosexual to the fullest.” He composed, collaborated, and performed
feverishly, and earned a Grammy nomination for his singing.
And some of the festival’s most touching moments came with the performance of Eastman’s vocal works. For Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, Julian Terrell Otis performed a capella, with high drama, as he teased nuance out of just a few lines: “Saint Michael said/Saint Margaret said/Saint Catherine said/They said/He said/She said/Joan/Speak Boldly/When they question you.”
Macle
(1971) made use of four singers, all from the
group Ekmeles, who let out quick yelps, quacks, and coughs, told
stories, and performed bits of songs they had selected—“Amazing Grace,”
Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” the Beach Boys’s “Don’t Talk,” and Jamila
Wood’s chorus on Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s “Sunday
Candy”: “You gotta move it slowly/Take and eat my body like it’s holy.”
They overlapped their parts, then went quiet, giving each other space to
be heard. Before long they were saying, with varying forms of
intonation and inflection: “TAKE HEART, TAKE”—a long pause”—“HEART.
TAKE. HEART! TAKE HEART!” They ran into the audience shouting it, and
then sprinted out of the room, slamming doors behind them.
Take heart. Keep pushing. Keep going. That is the message
and the conviction that Eastman’s work radiates, in ways both
ultra-sincere and playfully ironic. In Fememine (1974) at the
Kitchen on January 25, an almost brutally loud pair of mechanically
controlled sleigh bells laid down a bed of thick white noise that a
repeating vibraphone worked to break through. A piano provided quiet
chords. Flute, bassoon, trombone, and keyboard glided in. It went on for
more than an hour, building ever so gradually, with the piano’s chords
becoming more extroverted, almost rhapsodic. You couldn’t believe it
could get bigger, you couldn’t believe it hadn’t ended, you didn’t want
it to end.
Julius Eastman’s Femenine (1974) being performed at the Kitchen on January 25 with the S.E.M. Ensemble. THE KITCHEN
On that frigid Sunday night at the Knockdown Center, four pianists closed the evening with Crazy Nigger
(1979), the high point in a festival that had no shortage of them. It
began with insistent, urgent jabs on the piano, order that threatened to
spill into chaos. At points, all four players were hammering notes,
crescendoing gradually, letting loose cascades of sound that were
obliquely romantic and almost unearthly in their density. Near the end,
they slowed and fell away. A single player let loose huge, deep notes,
which rang through the brick space like the tintinnabulation of a giant
bell being struck at a glorious ceremony.
Nine additional people got up from their seats in the
crowd and stood behind various players, reaching down to the piano,
joining in. The tempo, set by the lowest rings, was deliberate as the
other players struck keys, making it sound like the loudest harp in the
world was ringing in a cavernous cathedral—it was celestial music,
speaking boldly, with nothing held back.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts/music/minimalist-composer-julius-eastman-dead-for-26-years-crashes-the-canon.html
Minimalist Composer Julius Eastman, Dead for 26 Years, Crashes the Canon
When
Julius Eastman died in 1990, almost no one knew. It wasn’t until an
obituary appeared in The Village Voice eight months later that his
friends and colleagues got the news.
“Most
of his closest associates,” the critic and musicologist Kyle Gann wrote
in The Voice, “when I called them for confirmation, had heard nothing
about it.”
A composer of visionary
power, a singer with a cavernous bass voice, a collaborator with the
diverse likes of Meredith Monk and Pierre Boulez, Eastman had long been a
fixture of the New York music scene. His sprawling, propulsive works
had titles that ranged from the bluntly provocative (“Evil Nigger”) to
the winking (“If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?”).
An archival recording of one of his finest pieces, the peculiarly spelled “Femenine,” from 1974, was released last month on the Frozen Reeds label,
and it shows what all the fuss was about. Ecstatically bustling, it’s
perhaps the most plainly beautiful thing Eastman wrote in a career spent
challenging his audiences.
“What I am
trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest,” he said in a 1976
interview. “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a
homosexual to the fullest.”
Contemporary
music has hardly been without significant black and queer artists. But
the story of Minimalism, in particular, has been dominated by straight
white men — La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass — and
Eastman is a vital addition to their company, even if his take on the
style was idiosyncratic and perhaps ahead of its time.
Julius Eastman, left, with the musicians Roberto Laneri, Jan Williams and Peter Kotik.CreditJim Tuttle/The University at Buffalo Music Library
But
in his final years, he got caught up in drugs, or mental illness, or
both. When he was evicted from his East Village apartment, many of his
scores were scattered and lost. He drifted from his brother’s home in
Brooklyn to his mother’s in Ithaca, N.Y., and back, and for a while, it
seems, spent nights in Tompkins Square Park. Then, in a Buffalo
hospital, he died; cardiac arrest was given as the official cause.
Declaring that
Eastman’s music “seethes with tension, hatred, triumph,” Mr. Gann’s
obituary was for a long time pretty much the final word. Without extant
scores, his works couldn’t be performed; without commercial recordings,
they could hardly be heard.
It was
through the curiosity and persistence of Mary Jane Leach, a composer and
performer who had worked with Eastman in the 1980s, that things began
to change. Spreading the word, starting in the late 1990s, that she was
looking for Eastmania, she became a clearinghouse
for information, bits of scores and audio, and in 2005 helped organize
the first commercial release of his work, a gripping three-disc,
three-hour set called “Unjust Malaise,” on New World Records.
In 2013, Jace Clayton, who often performs as DJ /rupture, released “The Julius Eastman Memory Depot,” ruminative remixes of solo-piano takes on Eastman. Late last year, “Gay Guerrilla,”
a book of essays that takes its title from one of Eastman’s pummeling
signature works, was published; it includes the first substantial
attempt to tell the story of his eventful, finally tragic life. In
April, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble performed his intense
“Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc” for 10 cellos (1981), whose dense score
had disappeared but was newly transcribed by Clarice Jensen from the
recording on “Unjust Malaise.”
And now, for the first time, we’re able to hear “Femenine,” a longing,
tender, grandly unruffled 70-minute masterpiece that takes its place at
the pinnacle of the Eastman works that have survived. (Its companion,
“Masculine,” is one of many that are, at least so far as we know,
completely lost.)
Eastman performances are burgeoning, including a concert planned for
February at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, where he spent
his most productive years. The Philadelphia new-music organization Bowerbird
is in the midst of a multiyear Eastman retrospective and is planning a
festival for May that the group hopes to repeat in New York next fall.
Bowerbird is also working to create dependable editions of his most
important works to avoid the errors that have crept into some recent
performances.
Part of the
pleasure of Eastman’s rediscovery has been the belated, deserving
reinsertion of a black, gay figure into music history. With additive,
slowly transforming repetitions at the heart of his major pieces,
Eastman has a clear connection to the Minimalist canon. But in the early
1970s, well before many others, he was using those repetitions as a
structure to contain improvisation, as well as rhythms and harmonies
borrowed from pop.
“Minimalism was
still in its austere, two-dimensional phase, conceptual and concerned
with abstract pattern,” Mr. Gann writes in “Gay Guerrilla,” “but in one
step Eastman started mixing genres and forecasting techniques that would
be tried in Post-Minimalism 15 years hence.”
Born
in 1940, Eastman was raised by his mother in middle-class Ithaca. A
gifted pianist from an early age, he started out as an accompanist for
dance classes. After graduating from the Curtis Institute of Music in
Philadelphia, where he was a talented if restless student, he made his
way to the new-music hotbed then flourishing around the State University
of New York at Buffalo. There, the composer and conductor Lukas Foss,
the influential music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, had helped
establish a vibrant system of artist residencies and concerts.
Buffalo
and its resources gave Eastman the opportunity to experiment in works
like the jazz-inflected, wailing “Thruway” (1970), an archival recording
of which can be heard at the university’s music library. (No video
footage exists, alas, of what one review described as “the chorus
walking through the audience as though blind.”) In “Trumpet” (1970), for
seven high brass or wind instruments, a drone of stratospherically
pitched dissonance gradually calms itself into shifting harmonies.
“Macle” (1971),
the score and a recording of which are available at the library, is a
riot. Influenced by John Cage, the score consists of large pages divided
into squares of enigmatic instructions for the four vocalists: “Sharp
stabbing sounds” and harsh daubs of ink in one box, for example; “Your
favorite pop tune” in another. In the recording, screams are
interspersed with electronic buzzes and chants of “Take heart,” the
work’s recurring, unofficial motto.
Eastman
gradually moved from the chaos of those early pieces toward a kind of
aggressive elegance. At the core of “Stay on It” (1973) is a bright,
relentless riff over which a vocalist merrily sings the title. But
improvised, wheezing, almost trippy passages emerge; the tight rhythmic
order dissolves. When the opening riff returns, it’s slower and warmer,
proceeding through chromatic transformations that are sometimes queasily
dissonant, sometimes hopeful. By the end, there’s just a single piano
playing, and, finally, the constant vibrating pulse of a tambourine.
That
tambourine effect returns in a big way in “Femenine,” the key element
of which is a mechanized contraption, invented by Eastman, that shook a
set of sleigh bells in an endless, wintry chugga-chugga. (Imagine if
Morton Feldman — central to Buffalo’s new-music activities in Eastman’s
day — had written an epic Christmas carol.)
A
small, pearly ensemble twitters, pipes up, coils, sings and surges over
the bells, as a piano provides a rich, mellow grounding. Around 45
minutes in, the piece gets to a genuinely blissed-out place, expansive
and swirling.
The angelic quality of
“Femenine” — not just quiet, peaceful angels, but the energetic,
trumpeting kind, too — marked a climax in Eastman’s work. It was in the
wake of his growing frustration with Buffalo and his subsequent move to
New York City that Eastman wrote, in the late 1970s, a handful of
forlorn, raging pieces, with incendiary titles.
Their
pounding, extravagantly impassioned repetitions and rushing rapids of
fury create a mood somehow simultaneously implacable and changeable.
Eastman captures at once society’s dehumanizing coldness and the
possibility of sustained, agile resistance to its strictures.
As
the 1980s progressed, Eastman’s behavior grew more unreliable. He
didn’t get a hoped-for faculty appointment at Cornell University and
squabbled with his family in wake of a beloved grandmother’s death. He
was said at some points to be living outdoors, at others in a homeless
shelter. Gaining some steadiness, he worked for a few months in the late
’80s, at the Tower Records on Fourth Street and Broadway.
“Then
one day,” Renée Levine Packer writes in her compassionate, cleareyed
biographical essay in “Gay Guerrilla,” “he just didn’t return.”
The
dissemination of Eastman’s music remains a bit shaggy, with his estate
controlled by his younger brother, Gerry, a jazz musician. In a phone
interview, Gerry Eastman said that he had recently finalized his
brother’s posthumous membership in Ascap, the music-licensing agency.
But after years spent trying to corral Julius’s widely strewn output, he
said he doubted a publisher would be interested in taking over that
project and “investing those kinds of resources.” For the time being,
those interested in performing Eastman works must still negotiate terms,
one by one, directly with him.
At
least those terms may not be too burdensome. “If you’re interested in
playing this music, just call me and we’ll talk,” Gerry Eastman said. “I
want the music to be heard, so I’m not going to be unreasonable.”
https://www.musicworks.ca/reviews/recordings/kukuruz-quartet-julius-eastman%E2%80%94piano-interpretations
Kukuruz Quartet. Julius Eastman—Piano Interpretations
Intakt Records, Intakt CD 306.
One outcome of the streaming era—not a necessary one, but a likely
one—is the devaluation of liner notes. It’s not that they don’t exist;
for example, George Lewis’s excellent notes to this collection of Julius
Eastman piano works by the Kukuruz Quartet appear both in the CD
booklet and as a PDF with the download version. But they should be
recognized and treated as the scholarship they sometimes are, and not
left by the wayside when digital files make their way along the stream
to other paid (and illicit) streaming services. That’s because
Lewis—himself, of course, a musician, composer, academic, and
author—frames so precisely in his essay what is so important about the
four compositions performed here by the four pianists of the Kukuruz
Quartet.
More than a quarter century after his demise, Eastman (who faced
homelessness and drug addiction during his latter years, and was all but
unknown when he died at age forty-nine in 1990) has become something of
a new-music cause célèbre in recent years. He was the subject of a
concert and gallery retrospective at the Kitchen in New York City, a
venue where he had performed in a city where he had lived, and his
spirited New York minimalism has been recorded anew and included in
concert and festival programs around the world. The Kukuruz Quartet
album is a worthy addition to the groundswell. They don’t shy away from
the profound descending theme of Evil Nigger and they find the fragility in Gay Guerrilla
(both composed in 1979). At twenty-one and thirty minutes respectively,
those two compositions dominate the disc. The program is rounded out by
a pair of less frequently heard works, the tilting and swaying Fugue No. 7 (1983) and the nearly translucent Buddha (1984).
Eastman had a penchant for composing for ensembles of like instruments,
and his work for multiple pianos is his strongest. The Swiss pianists
might not have a wealth of material for their ensemble, but they embrace
and inhabit Eastman’s work with full commitment.
In his liner notes, Lewis compares the collective forgetting of
Eastman’s work to that of another African American composer, Julia
Perry, who died eleven years earlier than he and is still awaiting her
own rediscovery. Lewis writes that composer, bassist, and visual artist
Benjamin Patterson has until recently also been left out of the
histories. There are other examples, and Lewis provides them.
This perhaps wilful forgetting, Lewis suggests, is the result of persistent framing of the avant-garde as an extension of European (read: white) artistic traditions. Eastman—a gay American of African decent—seems, even feels, to have been plenty aware of his cultural confinement. His titling of works (his portfolio also includes Nigger Faggot, Crazy Nigger, Dirty Nigger and If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?) is confrontational, even aggressive, while the works themselves are sometimes meditative, sometimes intellectually stimulating. Eastman isn’t challenging us to forget him, though, so much as he’s saying that he knows we will. It’s our job to prove him wrong, so that future generations see a late twentieth-century minimalism that doesn’t only have the complexion of Cage and Feldman. Kukuruz has done much to help stave off that near certainty. And so long as his text isn’t left along the edge of the information superhighway, Lewis has done so as well.
https://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/david_patrick_stearns/julius-eastman-is-celebrated-fundamentally-20170508.html
The unfinished genius of Julius Eastman
Composer Julius Eastman (1940-90) is not having an easy resurrection. But was anything about him ever easy?
His best pieces are acclaimed — though they have provocative, unprintable titles.
Surviving
scores have significant information gaps. Like how they fit together.
Or what they were titled. Or if they were ever performed.
"As
Julius' profile starts to emerge again with articles in the New Yorker
and the New York Times, more people are saying, `Oh, yeah, I knew that
guy. He did a concert in our space,' " said Dustin Hurt, whose
Bowerbird-produced concerts are a significant force in the Eastman
revival, starting with a 2015 program of his music and now with the
"That Which is Fundamental" festival.
"Black, openly gay, virtuosic, and arrogant" was how Eastman was described Friday by his younger brother Gerry at the festival opening. It was a magnetic combination in cutting-edge circles, but less welcome in the rest of the world.
Born
in Ithaca, N.Y., educated at the Curtis Institute, Eastman migrated
from one artistic hotbed to another, from the faculty of the University
of Buffalo when it was a new-music crucible in the 1970s to the downtown
Manhattan minimalist circles in the 1980s. His compositions were
performed at fashionable venues, such as the Kitchen, and his famously
exclamatory vocal performance in Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King was heard at the New York Philharmonic.
It was a wild time. Mary Jane Leach worked alongside him as a vocalist during that period in 1981: "At 10 a.m., Julius breezed in, dressed in black leather and chains, drinking Scotch," she wrote in an album note for an Eastman recording. "That was my introduction to the outrageousness that was Julius Eastman, who strove to push his identities as a gay black man and musician to the fullest."
Only
a few years later, having fallen afoul of addiction, he lost his scores
and papers in a New York apartment eviction and, living homeless, was
so off the grid that when Meredith Monk wanted him to sing on one of her
albums, the Lower East Side had to be plastered with fliers imploring
Eastman to call. Then at age 49, he made his way back to Buffalo, where
he died.
Eastman's revival began around 2005, with the release of the three-CD set Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise, on the New World label. Hurt discovered Eastman only several years ago, around the time of Gay Guerrilla,
a collection of essays about Eastman edited by Leach and Renee Levine
Packer (University of Rochester Press). At that time, barely a single
concert of Eastman music could be assembled. Now, Hurt estimates that
of Eastman's 50 or so works, 15 are lost. One piece, titled That Boy,
survives in a single page of incomprehensible score. Most enigmatic is
an untitled choral work that turned up months ago, written for the
largest ensembles of his career. It appears to have been performed, but
nobody yet knows where or when.
Scholars of centuries-old music are used to exhaustively piecing together enough evidence to yield a performance. Though Eastman's world is more chronologically recent, it's also strangely distant. Gerry Eastman had some scores. A blue suitcase owned by his late mother, Frances, yielded others. Hurt has spent days leafing through endless newspaper clippings in Buffalo, yielding a clue here and there that makes another piece fall into place. Friday's performance of Femenine, for example.
The
score to the hour-plus minimalist work has survived, but just last
year an archival recording by the S.E.M. Ensemble in Albany surfaced
that allowed performers to fill in the blanks, such as the hazy rhythmic
texture established by a set of jingle bells. How could anybody
maintain that exact rhythm for so long? One review described a
mechanical contraption invented to do the job. Also, Eastman served soup
during the performance — while wearing a dress.
Such
things weren't all that unusual in the 1970s avant-garde. Nor were
fragmentary scores. Acknowledged masterpieces such as Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians wasn't fully written down until years after its creation.
The question is whether these musical experiments still speak to the current century, and Femenine, performed
Friday at the Rotunda by the Arcana New Music Ensemble, turned out to
be as entrancing as anything written during that period by Reich or
Philip Glass. Underneath Eastman's incessantly repeated main theme, all
sorts of things arose — pianistic storm clouds, wind writing suggesting
fantastical plants growing in time-lapse photography, something
resembling a Bach chorale, and then, after an hour, a cathartic flute
melody.The 1974 recording captures perhaps only 60 percent of the
gravitas experienced here live.
Will
there be more of the same? Well, scores at the Slought Foundation show
Eastman using traditional notation in one score, graphic illustrations
in the next. He was always on the move. "Throughout his life, there was a
struggle to find a sense of belonging. … In the exhibition, you can see
how different he looks in pictures," said Hurt.
The
young Eastman could pass for a Bible salesman. But in a somber series
of black-and-white portraits, he has a shaved head and long prophetlike
beard, with bony bare shoulders. Yet these photos, by Andrew Roth, date
from 1980, when Eastman was on the upswing.
His story is that of an unfinished symphony. You don't have the luxury of understanding what's there from the perspective of where it led. Hurt readily refers to Eastman as a creative genius. But will the full range of that genius ever be heard?
Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental continues May 12, 19 and 26 at The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St. Tickets: $12-$25.
Information:267-231-9813.www.ThatWhichIsFundamental.com. Exhibition through May 28 at Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St., noon-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, free.
https://www.indiewire.com/2014/05/consider-the-mysterious-life-death-of-african-american-composer-pianist-julius-eastman-for-your-next-film-project-235661/
Consider The Mysterious Life & Death Of African American Composer, Pianist Julius Eastman For Your Next Film Project
Channeling Julius Eastman, a Gay, African American Composer
Composer Julius Eastman is the focus of a project by the Otolith Group and it was included in this year’s Sharjah Biennial.
SHARJAH, UAE — “There are of course 99 names of Allah, but there are 52 niggers. So therefore, I will be playing two of these niggers.” This is what Julius Eastman said during his introduction to the Northwestern University audience at a concert in June of 1980, and it is repeated in the Otolith Group‘s piece “The Third Part of the Third Measure” (2017), presented at this year’s Sharjah Biennial.
During the video, that lasts 50 minutes, two performers (a black man, Dante Micheaux, and a black woman, Elaine Mitchener) recite the entire statement. It is a riveting recitation by both actors, whose deliveries are very different. Micheaux, who performs at the beginning of the video, is calm and matter of fact in his approach, while Mitchener at certain points wails, as if begging the audience to hear and understand the import of what she says. After the actors’ declamation the pianists play — four pianists at two pianos bring “Evil Nigger,” “Gay Guerrilla,” and “Crazy Nigger,” to life. The appearance of the four pianists provide an odd visual contrast: they are all white and their faces are marked with abstract shapes contrived with silver makeup. The combination of the extraordinary visuals and the minimalist music of Eastman — an avant-garde, black, gay composer of music that sounds otherwordly — keeps me in my seat with no sense of time passing.
Joy Boy by Julius Eastman& Unearthed by Frozen Reeds in 2017, this recording of Eastman’s queer-themed Joy Boy was performed by the S.E.M. ensemble, at the same concert as his well sought out Femenine. The piece consists of staccato reed and a vocal quartet that work together, in ways that are simultaneously obtuse and harmonious. The voices are strange and unwavering, further complimented by an incidental noise from shuffling audience members and chesty coughs. The naked tempestuousness of this piece can give the listener the illusion of knowing more about Eastman than is actually possible. The piece is so riddled with imperfection yet in total somehow it translates to the polar opposite. A demonstration of just how rash the human voice can be.
Julius Eastman - Femenine (1974)
This 2016 release of a 1974 Eastman performance offers a completely new perspective on his body of work. Femenine is one of a select few ways by which you can actually experience Eastman as a performer. According to many he’d always been an eccentric presence. In one instance Mary Jane Leach described him as having turned up to a choir performance dressed in leather and chains. His overt queerness, pushed Eastman away from the strictly hetero world of classical. Even the quietly queer John Cage was said to be repulsed by explicit, homoerotic reframing of his own Song Books by S.E.M. Ensemble, during which Eastman stripped male singers naked on stage.
The title of Femenine, is the first overt reference Eastman makes to gender nonconformity. While a reference to the reality of being effeminate in 70s New York is bold in itself, the piece yields something just as subversive.
In many ways it is a sister composition not only to Masculine but to Stay On It too. It shares the same buoyant vibrancy and general infectiousness. Beginning with machine controlled sleigh bells that perpetuate through the 72 minute duration, Femmine is testament to both Eastman’s sense of humour and derision of his contemporaries. This machine programmed instrument almost seems to satirise the almost industrial performance that can turn many off from the contemporary classical music of that time.
Julius Eastman - Evil N*gger (1979)
This is a part of a self-titled series, which were a collection of pieces written in the late 70s and early 80s. The pieces, and this one in particular, characterises the identity politics of his music. It’s a challenge not only to the musical politics of New York’s avant-garde, which is often documented as bigoted but also a challenge to its social politics. And Evil N*gger is one of Eastman’s loudest statements. Not only a reclamation of the slur in its title, it is formally bold and provocative with an integrally defiant and restless energy. This power is created through an evocative dark piano composition and is profoundly epic in the most acute way possible. Minimalism is often accused of being devoid of passion and emotion but this is not something that can be levelled at the work of Eastman.
Julius Eastman- Gay Guerrilla (1980)
The worlds of contemporary classical and (for the most part) the avant-garde in the 70s and 80s, weren't the most accommodating of scenes for the person of colour or the queer alike. The miasmic entrenchment of the classical and traditional rung true then, just as many say it does it does now. As the militant queer dichotomy Gay Guerrilla is combative of this, and it is far from timid in what it’s trying to say.
Beginning in lonely stuttering notes, slowly unraveling into defiant crescendos, before the final part repurposes Martin Luther’s A Mighty Fortress Is Our God into a queer manifesto. Gay Guerrilla exposes the very best aspects of Eastman as a composer and social commentator. And while racial and sexual politics inform Eastman’s work greatly, they certainly don’t define them. He expresses feeling in its coldest and most naked form. Understanding this begins with the acknowledgment that Eastman is a black gay man. Gay Guerilla is one of the most moving pieces ever to be written for eight hands. Propulsive – it’s a bombastic tragedy, and a deeply saddening one.
Meredith Monk-Dolmen Music (1981)
Luminaries to one another, the artistic connection between Eastman and Meredith Monk was long and meaningful. While Eastman provides the foreboding organ on the opener to what many consider Monk’s opus Turtle Dreams, his monastic vocals on Dolmen Music’s final piece is their greatest collaboration. Monk’s explorations of human vocal texture enamoured Eastman more than that of any other contemporary composer. And when you look at what he tries to achieve with his own music, the connection becomes quite obvious.
Dolmen Music traverses the complexities of the masculine and the feminine through means of voice. And the climax of this record sees them combine forces harmoniously. While it would certainly be a stretch to call Eastman a gender abolitionist, with the little information we actually have about him, his work does seem intent on destroying binaries as much as possible.
Dolmen Music was later sampled by DJ Shadow on Endtroducing thus forging a tenuous bridge between Eastman and the mainstream.
Dinosaur L - 24→24 Music (1981)
Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell are not too dissimilar. It’s easy to categorise both as under-appreciated queer icons who died way too early. Both were never credited with the acclaim they deserved. Their music can be something of a hotspot for queer tourist record collectors alike. What better way to support the cause then buying into Russell who died of AIDS in 1992? That’s not to discredit straight people who love Arthur Russell - his music is about much more than being gay - but records like World Of Echo in particular will always be a sacred part of queer musical history. And revisionist history can often leave that aspect out thus erasing queer narratives.
If Arthur Russell’s lyrics encapsulate being gay in the 80s then Eastman’s instrumentals score it. Julius Eastman conducted a large amount of Russell’s orchestral recordings , but their most notable convergence comes in the world of disco arguably one of the first genre subcultures to be a somewhat LGBT safe space.
Eastman plays organ and provides baritone backing on Dinosaur L’s 24→24 Music, which is probably the biggest floor filling record for Eastman, if not Russell. At times awkwardly programmed beats, cartoonish vocals, a no wave aesthetic and lyrics like “You’re gonna be clean on your bean”, make it hard to understand. 24→24 Music is the weirdest outlier in Eastman’s Career.
Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner (2013)
One aspect of Eastman’s personality that’s often underestimated is his sense of humour. Even though he wasn't shy of tackling grave issues this wasn't a constant thing for him. In the excellent documentary Without A Net Renee Levine Packer describes him as “very funny but also very serious. Very serious and grave at his core even though he’d assume [resemblance] of someone who was very relaxed.” The Jace Clayton 2013 live tribute to Eastman is testament to this. As well as performing many of his pieces the show envisages a world in which Julius Eastman is a coffee table composer and household name through vignette and parody. In one instance Clayton Skype interviews Arooj Aftab for the role of Julius Eastman Impersonator.
Kukuruz Quartet - Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations (2018)
Julius Eastman Piano Interpretations by Kukuruz Quartet
The new and justified resurgence in interest in Eastman’s music over the past few years has meant that reinterpretations of his work have become an inevitability. Kurukuz Quartet connect themselves with Eastman in 2014 where they performed his music to standing ovations in Athens. Last year the Zürich ensemble rendered four of Eastman’s finest piano pieces for CD release. Fugue no. 7, Evil N*gger, Buddha and Gay Guerrilla.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/02/05/julius-eastman-music
Resurrecting The Political, Avant-Garde Music Of Julius Eastman
VIDEO: 9:52
Editor's Note: This segment contains audio that some listeners may find disturbing or offensive.
Composer
Julius Eastman died homeless in 1990. Just 49 years old, he represented
a promising future in avant-garde, minimalist classical music. As a
black, openly gay man, he stood out from his largely white peers. He
wrote challenging, political music with provocative titles. Much of that
work was lost after he died, but historians have been piecing it back
together.
Here & Now's Robin Young speaks with Tiona Nekkia McClodden, co-curator of the new exhibit "Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental," now on view at The Kitchen gallery in New York.
Interview Highlights
On who Julius Eastman was
"Julius
was a product of a family that had a piano in the house. And an older
brother to a younger brother who later in his life went on to a jazz
background. But Julius, you know, he learned to play piano by ear
around, like, 3, and from there was given an opportunity to have a
personal teacher."
On his time at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia
"Definitely
not a lot of black students at Curtis Music Institute, which, because
of — Curtis Music Institute, at the time, didn't have a proper campus,
so the students would come in and they would be placed with families. No
one would take Julius, so he actually had to stay at the local YMCA
during his entire run there."
On his piece "Femenine"
"It
slowly builds. He had this idea around organic music and music that
progressed over time. So a lot of his work is durational in form, and
this particular piece, we're looking at well over an hour and it just
slowly, gradually changes and changes and changes. To listen to it, you
kind of go through a lot of different pain thresholds to come out to the
end. But it's a stunning piece. It's one of my favorite pieces of his."
On his performance of Peter Maxwell Davies' "Eight Songs for a Mad King," and whether he was mad
"I
think he was definitely affected by a lot of things of the time. I will
say, for instance, Julius went into Attica [Correctional Facility],
after the Attica uprisings, at the prison in upstate New York, and
performed several times. So he was affected and was well aware about
these different things that were happening at this time and how that
would manifest in regards to his person, primarily as a black man in a
predominately white space. So I think there's a part that is, there's
madness — or mad — but then there's also this element of like, you know,
him just moving through things and wanting to be free of a lot of the
traditional standards of what you would think a person would desire."
On how "Evil Nigger," one of his most controversial series, was received
"Pretty
rough, the first presentation. The black student union completely tried
to stage a protest which led to the prompt of him actually doing the
introduction that precedes 'Crazy Nigger,' where he talks about his
conceptual framework behind the actual piece, in dealing with labor,
capitalism in this country and black bodies. It's something that over
time has been something that people shy away from because it is one of
the works that, actually, we do have a score for. But at other times you
have people kind of really exploiting and pushing that to the forefront
without acknowledging the conceptual framework behind it."
On his living conditions near the end of his life, and how homelessness, drugs and alcohol may have factored in
"If
you take into consideration, I think the downtown scene, I think he got
swooped up in a lot of the elements, so I wouldn't say it's entirely
one over the other. We have one of the last interviews with him featured
in the actual exhibition, where he talks about liking to be homeless
and liking to give his money away to homeless people — because he
actually made money up until his death — and liking to be a free spirit
that wandered around. So there's part of it that is part of the system
of how people received him and related with him, but the way that he
moved with music was just with full force."
On why his music is being resurrected right now
"For
me, I was very interested in the fact of how someone could be obscured
or taken off the map, so my whole interest in Julius' legacy is to make
sure his personhood isn't separated from his music. Because the music is
being resurrected, played, exploited in all different forms, but I
think there has been a severe neglect on his personhood."
On what people should listen for with his music
"I
think you just have to sit through it and quiet yourself and listen to
his music — after a while you can notice the changes. It has a very
haptic feel to it, so it actually shifts the way your body feels. So I
usually tell people to give it a shot, play it and just feel the
changes, and so then you can get an understanding of what I think he was
working at."
This segment aired on February 5, 2018.
https://www.thatwhichisfundamental.com/about
bowerbird presents
Julius Eastman:
That Which Is Fundamental
Curated by Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Dustin Hurt
presented in conjunction with the Eastman Estate, and in collaboration with Slought and The RotundaThat Which Is Fundamental is the first comprehensive examination of Eastman's legacy to work alongside the Eastman Estate, an organization led by Gerry Eastman to gather together, organize, preserve, disseminate, and generally further the work of his brother, Julius.
Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental is a project of Bowerbird, a Philadelphia based non profit dedicated to presenting experimental music and related art forms. For more info visit: www.bowerbird.org
listen to julius eastman
julius eastman: experimental intermedia excerpt
julius eastman: prelude joan d'arc excerpt
Mary Jane Leach on Julius Eastman's Prelude Joan D'Arc
Creating a monophonic composition seems as though
it should be easy to do, unless you’re a composer and are aware of the
pitfalls that await you. Are you writing to showcase your musical ideas?
Writing to showcase a performer? Exploiting an instrument to its
extremes? Showcasing its beautiful sound? You can err on the side of
simplicity, or complexity. Are you trying to overwhelm or soothe? So
many issues, made so much more difficult with that one note at a time
restriction.
I will be writing about Julius Eastman’s Prelude
to Joan d’Arc (Prelude) for solo voice, which he created and performed,
how it relates to his body of work, and showing some of the influences
that went into it.
Starting approximately in the 1970s, the
composer-performer began to re-emerge (with the exception of composers
who were pianists, and who had continued their dual roles), after too
many years of separation, and many composers began to write music for
themselves to perform. This came about because of music that they wanted
to write and/or perform, as well as for expediency. It is much easier
to book and pay for a solo concert than one that needs rehearsal time
and has to pay other musicians. It also bypasses having to wait for
someone else to perform your music.
In his article The Composer as Weakling, Julius Eastman (1940-90) wrote about “the poor relationship between composer and instrumentalist, and the puny state of the contemporary composer in the classical music world. If we make a survey of classical music programming or look at the curriculum and attitudes in our conservatories, we would be led to believe that today’s instrumentalist lacks imagination, scholarship, a modicum of curiosity; or we would be led to believe that music was born in 1700, lived a full life until 1850 at which time music caught an incurable disease and finally died in 1900.” 1
Eastman certainly didn’t lack scholarship, having graduated from the Curtis Institute with a degree in composition. And he most certainly did not lack imagination or curiosity. He was both a composer and a gifted vocalist and pianist. In addition to his own compositions, he performed a wide variety of music. Best known for his performance of Peter Maxwell-Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, one of the most demanding vocal parts in twentieth-century music, he also performed music from all periods, from Bach to Haydn to Richard Strauss to [Gian Carlo] Menotti and [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, often under the baton of famous conductors such as Lukas Foss, Pierre Boulez, and Zubin Mehta. He was also familiar with jazz and improvisation, at times performing with his brother Gerry, a bassist with the Count Basie Band, among other groups. His compositions evince the culmination of the wide variety of music that he was exposed to, creating music that is indisputably and uniquely his own.
Writing authoritatively about Eastman is somewhat precarious, as much of his work, both scores and recordings, were lost when he was evicted from his East Village apartment in New York City in 1983 or 84. The sheriff had dumped his possessions onto the street, with Eastman making no effort to recover any of his music. Various friends, upon hearing this, tried to salvage as much as they could, but most was lost. So inferences have to be drawn from the few scores and recordings that do exist, coupled with concert reviews and recollections of people involved in these events, some of which contradict each other.
Eastman’s earliest works, from his Curtis days
were primarily for piano, or piano and voice, and had fairly traditional
titles (Sonata, Birds Fly Away, I Love the River, Piano Piece I-IV) as
well as a few with somewhat provocative titles (Insect Sonata and The
Blood). He became a member of the Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo in
1969, a group of virtuoso performers who performed music by many of the
most important living composers. He began to write pieces with an
expanded instrumentation, adding electronics at times, and with titles
that became more provocative (Touch Him When, Five Gay Songs, Joy Boy).
He moved to New York in 1976 and I have a feeling that, once he left Buffalo, he didn't have access to the same kind of ready group of musicians to perform his work. So, he began to create pieces that he could perform solo, either on piano or as a vocalist. He had two solo concerts in New York that year: one at Environ, Praise God From Whom All Devils Grow, which was reviewed, and another at Experimental Intermedia Foundation, for which there was a recording. Both concerts were improvisational in nature.
In his review of the Environ concert, Tom Johnson noted that “There are probably more composers-performers today than ever before. Many composers have had traditional performing skills, but people like Paganini and Rachmaninoff, whose music really depended on their performance abilities, have been rare….But of course, there are also purely artistic reasons why musicians sometimes prefer to write for themselves instead of for other performers. In some cases composers really seem to find themselves once they begin looking inside their own voices and instruments, and come up with strong personal statements that never quite came through as long as the were creating music for others to play.” He went on to note that Eastman played piano in a “high-energy, free-jazz style,” and sang in a “crazed baritone.” 2 Joseph Horowitz also noted that the singing was “often demonic.” 3 It seems that he usually didn’t combine voice and piano in these concerts, and that his piano playing tended more towards free jazz, while his vocal solos were more minimal and in the style of Avant-Garde classical music.
Listening to his Experimental Intermedia concert, which was primarily solo voice, the singing was fairly ornate and melismatic. At times it even seemed medieval, especially Spanish medieval music, with rhythms being tapped out in that style. Although he had used extended vocal techniques in earlier pieces, such as Macle, written in 1971, this singing is fairly straightforward.
His use of text in the Experimental Intermedia concert, source unknown, is very interesting and reminiscent of Gertrude Stein. For the first 2:20, only four words are sung “To know the difference,” usually in groups of one or two words. Gradually, words are added, usually one at a time, so that by 4:42 sixteen words are being sung in various combinations “To know the difference between the one without another. But he is the one behind the zero. To know the difference between the one and the zero.” By 6:28 twenty-four words are being sung, adding: “Be known to you and to me that the one is after zero and his place is one. His place is behind the zero. His name is one.”
The work of Gertrude Stein was very well known in the circles that Eastman was part of. She wrote in a repetitive style, using a limited vocabulary, as in the example below.
He had been nicely faithful. In being one he was one who had he been one continuing would not have been one continuing being nicely faithful. He was one continuing, he was not continuing to be nicely faithful. In continuing he was being one being the one who was saying good good, excellent but in continuing he was needing that he was believing that he was aspiring to be one continuing to be able to be saying good good, excellent. He had been one saying good good, excellent. He had been that one. 4
Eastman had worked with Petr Kotik in the SEM Ensemble from 1969-75. Kotik wrote Many, Many Women, using text by Stein, and which Eastman performed in at various stages of its development. He also had met and performed with Virgil Thomson, who had written two operas using texts by Stein. And, one of his close collaborators, the choreographer Andrew deGroat, for whom Eastman wrote The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (Joan), was a big fan of Stein. Besides having their use of repetition in common, Stein was searching for the “bottom nature” 5 of her characters, while Eastman was searching for “that which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness.” 6 They were both gay.
Eastman’s Praise God From Whom All Devils Grow concert at Environ, which made a profane interpretation of the hymn Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow, is his first instance of an overt reference to a religious text, although in a transgressive way. On the other hand, his Experimental Intermedia concert, while it had no overt religious references, juxtaposed super-8 film showing dog shit and close-ups of a drag queen, displaying in your face sexuality and depravity.
By 1978 Eastman, who was black and flamboyantly gay, was composing pieces that were part of a “Nigger” series of works, Nigger Faggot (NF) and Dirty Nigger, both for chamber ensemble, as well as Crazy Nigger, for multiples of one instrument, but usually performed on pianos. It was the first of a trio of pieces usually performed on four pianos. The other two pieces, Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla, were written in 1979. Although their titles are provocative, the music isn’t, and they are probably the pieces that sealed Eastman’s reputation as an excellent composer.
So there was this duality going on in Eastman’s work – provocative titles, texts, and multi-media paired with ecstatic music. Gradually actual religious texts began to be used by Eastman, and at least by spring of 1980 he was improvising using religious texts, with titles such as Humanity and the Four Books of Confucious. He was a spiritual person and used texts from many religions.
In 1981 he wrote Joan, scored for ten cellos, that was paired with de Groat’s dance Gravy, which was presented at The Kitchen in New York. It is a vital, through-written, and dense piece full of rhythm and many melodies. Eastman had heard and was inspired by Patti Smith’s Rock N Roll Nigger, and he used that opening rhythm in Joan, using it throughout much of the piece.
In the early 1980s, the Creative Music Foundation received a grant to make three radio programs featuring three composers. Eastman was chosen to be one of these composers, and Joan was recorded at the Third Street Music School Settlement with ten freelance cellists, in a barely rehearsed and quickly recorded session. Steve Cellum was the recording engineer, and he remembers that a couple of weeks after the session, while trying to choose which take to use, Eastman casually mentioned that he wanted to record a vocal introduction, something that hadn’t been mentioned before then. So Cellum lugged his equipment up to Eastman’s tiny East Village apartment, which was not a very good recording situation, but is how Prelude came to be recorded. As far as I know, it was never performed with a live performance of Joan. I had always assumed that it was added in order to fulfill a time requirement for the radio program, but it turns out that there was no such requirement. Also recorded was a spoken introduction, which was the program notes from the Kitchen performance:
Dear Joan,
Find presented a work of art, in your name, full of honor, integrity, and boundless courage. This work of art, like all works of art in your name, can never and will never match your most inspired passion. These works of art are like so many insignificant pebbles at your precious feet. But I offer it none the less. I offer it as a reminder to those who think that they can destroy liberators by acts of treachery, malice, and murder. They forget that the mind has memory. They forget that Good Character is the foundation of all acts. They think that no one sees the corruption of their deeds, and like all organizations (especially governments and religious organizations), they oppress in order to perpetuate themselves. Their methods of oppression are legion, but when they find that their more subtle methods are failing, they resort to murder. Even now in my own country, my own people, my own time, gross oppression and murder still continue. Therefore I take your name and meditate upon it, but not as much as I should.
Dear Joan,
When meditating on your name I am given strength and dedication. Dear Joan I have dedicated myself to the liberation of my own person firstly. I shall emancipate myself from the materialistic dreams of my parents; I shall emancipate myself from the bind of the past and the present; I shall emancipate myself from myself.
Dear Joan,
There is not much more to say except Thank You. And please accept this work of art, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, as a sincere act of love and devotion.
Yours with love,
Julius Eastman
One Dedicated to Emancipation
As verbose as the spoken introduction is, the Prelude is the opposite. It is 11:45, but only uses fifteen words, three of which are only used once.
Saint Michael said
Saint Margaret said
Saint Catherine said
They said
He said
She said
Joan
Speak Boldly
When they question you [used only once]
The three saints mentioned are the ones that Joan of Arc claimed to hear, and who counseled her to speak boldly at her trial for heresy.
Even more minimal than the text is the musical material: consisting almost exclusively of descending notes in a minor chord, a minor rising third, and alternating minor seconds. I was shocked when I realized this, as the piece is so engrossing, that you don’t notice how little is happening musically. There really is no musical development, no compositional sleight of hand, and the words are repetitious. Just plain singing, no extended techniques, no ornamentation. There is the voice, though, and the conviction behind it, the meditation on Joan of Arc, that draws you in. It is probably Eastman’s most minimal work, pared of any excess, and it is ironic that it is paired with Joan, which is probably the most through-written piece of his, and with as dense a texture as Prelude is bare.
Only the first page of the score for Joan exists,
which was printed in the program for the Kitchen performances. For many
composers of that time, there was a lot of verbal performance practice
in effect, with many of a piece’s instructions delivered verbally and
not specifically notated in the score, as well as employing a kind of
shorthand notation that might have made sense in the context of the
moment, but can seem baffling years later. Most of Eastman’s pieces are
like this. Joan, though, because it involved so many performers, and
usually in situations with little rehearsal time, had to be written out.
Eastman had an unforgettable personality, but the cellists that he
worked with had so little contact with him that most of them barely
remember him, unlike almost everyone else who ever came into contact
with him.
Many of us in those days (1970s and 80s) would
agree to do a concert, and realize a few days before the concert, that
we didn’t have enough material, so it was a not uncommon practice to do a
structured improvisation to fill out the concert. Although Eastman
didn’t need to stretch out the length of the recording, I envision him
using this same process, of preparing for a structured improvisation,
before recording Prelude, selecting the text he wanted to use, and an
idea of what he wanted to do musically. Usually the tension of
performing in front of an audience tightens one’s focus and brings an
energy to a performance that cannot be recreated in a rehearsal. That
Eastman was able to do so much with so little, in a small, noisy
apartment,and with no audience is amazing.
Eastman assimilated many of his wealth of
influences, including composers from the past. I cannot know for sure if
he was familiar with the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, but there are at
least a couple of synchronicities between their work. Meyerbeer used the
Lutheran hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God in the overture to Les
Huguenots, while Eastman used the hymn in Gay Guerrilla. In Robert le
Diable, Meyerbeer has Bertram, a disciple of Satan, singing to the
ghosts of sinful nuns. His solo is very similar to the beginning of
Prelude, in which Eastman is channeling Joan’s conversations with her
three saints – they have the same first three notes, with Betram
continuing down to the next note in the chord. Fantasy perhaps, but the
musical similarity is striking, and the contrast in characters, saint
and sinners, even more so.
Eastman continues in his article on composer/performers:
If we look closely before 1750, we will
notice that composer/instrumentalist were one and the same whether
employed by the church, the aristocracy, or self-employed (Troubadours).
At the beginning of the age of virtuosity,
beginning with the life of Paganini, we see the splitting of the egg
into two parts, one part instrumentalist, one composer. At this time we
also notice the rise of the solo performer, the ever increasing size of
the orchestra, the ascendance of the conductor, and the recedence of the
composer from active participation in the musical life of his
community, into the role of the unattended queen bee, constantly
birthing music in his lonely room, awaiting the knock of an
instrumentalist, conductor, or lastly, an older composer who has gained
some measure of power. These descending angels would not only have to
knock, but would also have to open the door, because the composer had
become so weak from his isolated and torpid condition. Finally, the
composer would be borne aloft on the back of one of the three
descendants, into a life of ecstasy, fame, and fortune.
This being the case, it is the composer’s
task to reassert him/herself as an active part of the musical community,
because it was the composer who must reestablish himself as a vital
part of the musical life of his/her community.
The composer is therefore enjoined to
accomplish the following: she must establish himself as a major
instrumentalist, he must not wait upon a descending being, and she must
become an interpreter, not only of her own music and career, but also
the music of her contemporaries, and give a fresh new view of the known
and unknown classics.
Today’s composer, because of his
problematical historical inheritance, has become totally isolated and
self-absorbed. Those composers who have gained some measure of success
through isolation and self-absorption will find that outside of the loft
door the state of the composer in general and their state in particular
is still as ineffectual as ever. The composer must become the total
musician, not only a composer. To be only a composer is not enough. 7
Eastman was the embodiment of a
composer/performer, one who could construct a dense piece full of
counterpoint, such as Joan, and then create Prelude, using so little
material that you wonder how it can hold together and work, but through
the strength of his performance, he made it work, discovering what was
indeed fundamental by discarding the superficial. 8
-Mary Jane Leach
Composer bojan vuletic listens to julius eastman
Bojan Vuletic has been like a brother to me for
the past 10 years. We've shared a lot of musical and non-musical joys
and struggles, long conversations and short mental battles. I have
performed his music since the day we met and have always found his
understanding of the technical mastery of the act of composing to be
second only to his desire to represent very real emotional content.
Bojan was in New York to premiere one of his new
works: part of his Recomposing Art series, and I used the chance to
include someone with a very non-American perspective in the
conversation. I consider him a master of the mechanics of thought and
emotion. Because of this, I wanted to give him a piece that he would
have a hard time placing in a context, so that there would be little
historical or technical footing for him to work with. It wasn't until
after he'd heard the Prelude that he was given a biography of Julius
Eastman.
Nate Wooley: First of all, what’s your general impression? You’ve never heard any Julius Eastman before?
Bojan Vuletic: No.
NW: What are your first thoughts, before I start giving you any information?
BV: Obviously it was clergical in some sense. As there are no instruments accompanying the singing, and it feels like it has some kind of calling it is clear to me that it could be performed in a church. I guess that’s where the musical language comes from.
NW: Do you think that’s why he used monophony?
BV: Yes, that’s apparent, I think.
NW: Now that you’ve seen that he was an African-American composer, I’ll tell you a little bit more about him. He worked mostly in the 1970s. As you noticed from the titles of some of his other pieces, there’s a political element there…some of the titles could be a bit shocking, I guess. With that knowledge, what do you think of the content of the opening. Does it take on a different quality to you?
BV: Of course, yes. If that piece had been sung by a priest, this wouldn’t appeal to me. I think there is definitely some kind of contradiction in the performance. It’s the composer singing right? So, it’s what’s in his head. It’s a little bit over the top from the very first moment; more than you would need to to have your voice be heard in a church, so there’s something to that. And, I think if he composed these other pieces with provocative names, there is probably a political statement.
NW: Did you feel that it was a liturgical sounding piece based on the musical choices and also the fact that he’s invoking the names of saints or by the way he was singing? What part of the way that he sang it played into the way you perceived it?
BV: There was a strangeness before I had any information, because I was actually expecting it to erupt in some ways. And, there were two or three moments where it went somewhere else: one being where he sang the ½ steps.
At the beginning, I thought, “oh, he’ll deconstruct all this”. But, hearing the whole piece I would say…just me, being a non-native speaker,…”St. whatever said”…said in the sense of told [spoke], right?
NW: Yes.
BV: It was like an endless train in a sense, so it could have been St. George said [that] St. Peter said [that], etc. It could be read in that way. But now I think it’s more like whoever is calling, no one is answering (laughs)
NW: Or that he’s not going to reveal what they said.
BV: Well, that could be another thing. In that sense I thought it was; well this is guesswork, but for me when you look at the language of the church, it’s a sort of code. It took a lot of time before the mass was read in the language that the people lived..it was read in Latin, so that was a kind of a code. In this context, that was an association I had. The church is calling you, naming names, but not telling you what it is.
NW: Do you feel like you miss harmony at all in this piece?
BV: No.
NW: What role do you think harmony plays in this composition?
BV: It’s clear he’s suggesting the harmony with the melody, and it’s mostly ostinato figures, so it’s very clear the way it’s structured. There is a thing that he did move sometimes with his voice down a minor second, but not in a completely clear way, so it could either be an intonation thing or it give it a little twist. It has a feeling like a naïve painting approach to me; very clear colors; very simple. But then there’s a twist to it somehow.
NW: But also it seems to me that in naïve painting that there’s a certain kind of expression that comes from the simplicity of it. This is one of the thigns that you’re not getting as part of the project is that this is a prologue to another piece. That pieces is a cello octet that’s more dense.
BV: So the prologue is monophonic and then the piece is dense? That makes sense.
NW: Did you have a different feeling about it when you found out more about him?
BV: For me, the piece didn’t have a connection to what I would think of as African-American musical culture, so it was a surprise to find out he was African-American There were two things that are actually out of a different cultural context, but I had an association with [when listening to this piece]. I had one project called Polyphonie and it was about the hidden treasures that are present, musically, in people from other cultures living in Germany. I did a lot of exploring there and it was pretty interesting. One [of the participants] was a Jewish cantor singing a capella and it sounded nearly like a contemporary piece. Since I didn’t understand what he was saying, I was just looking for musical structures. I could see it had a strong complexity. When I talked to him and figured out what he was doing, I realized it actually had very simply structures behind it. In this context, I find that idea very interesting because [Eastman] is laying out the structure very clearly. So, when you say it’s a prologue to something else, I feel like this becomes the key to what comes after.
NW: I think with Eastman, too, his other music is loosely aligned (in my head at least) with minimalism like Steve Reich/Philip Glass…there’s complexity, but the structure is very clear.
BV: But the big difference between this and a Philip Glass piece is, there seems to be a concert hall attitude to the Glass vocal pieces I’ve heard, which this piece doesn’t have at all. I think if it had that attitude I couldn’t listen to it. I wouldn’t be able to stand it I think. I think it’s very interesting that it’s the composer singing this. I think if it was a repertoire piece for a concert hall, I would hate it probably (laughs)
NW: Well, he’s very heavily classically trained
BV: Yeah, but it’s not obvious, he’s not showing off. It’s funny as well, because I expected this arc, especially with monophonic music I expect a large arc, but he starts very hot and only at the end does he have this deep dynamic fall to almost whispering. It’s a very interesting and strange structure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Eastman
Julius Eastman
Biography
Julius Eastman grew up in Ithaca, New York, with his mother, Frances Eastman, and younger brother, Gerry. He began studying piano at age 14 and made rapid progress. He studied at Ithaca College before transferring to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. There he studied piano with Mieczysław Horszowski and composition with Constant Vauclain, and switched majors from piano to composition. He made his debut as a pianist in 1966 at The Town Hall in New York City immediately after graduating from Curtis. Eastman had a rich, deep, and extremely flexible singing voice, for which he became noted for his 1973 Nonesuch recording of Eight Songs for a Mad King by the British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. Eastman's talents gained the attention of composer-conductor Lukas Foss, who conducted Davies' music in performance at the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
At the behest of Foss, Eastman joined the Creative Associates—a "prestigious program in avant-garde classical music" that "carried a stipend but no teaching obligations"[1]—at SUNY Buffalo's Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. During this period, he met Petr Kotik, a Czech-born composer, conductor, and flutist. Eastman and Kotik performed together extensively in the early to mid-1970s. Along with Kotik, Eastman was a founding member of the S.E.M. Ensemble.
From 1971 he performed and toured with the group, and composed numerous works for it. During this period, fifteen of Eastman's earliest works were performed by the Creative Associates, including Stay On It (1973), an early augury of postminimalism and one of the first art music compositions inspired by progressions from popular music, presaging the later innovations of Arthur Russell and Rhys Chatham. Although Eastman began to teach theory and composition courses over the course of his tenure, he left Buffalo in 1975 following a controversially ribald performance of John Cage's aleatoric Songbooks by the S.E.M. Ensemble under the aegis of Morton Feldman. It included nudity and homoerotic allusions interpolated by Eastman. The elderly Cage was incensed and said during an ensuing lecture that Eastman's "[ego]... is closed in on homosexuality. And we know this because he has no other ideas." Additionally, Eastman's friend Kyle Gann has speculated that his inability to acclimate to the more bureaucratic elements of academic life (including paperwork) may have hastened his departure from the university.[1]
Shortly thereafter, Eastman settled in New York City, where he initially straddled the divide between the conventionally bifurcated "uptown" and downtown music scenes. Eastman often wrote his music following what he called an "organic" principle. Each new section of a work contained all the information from previous sections, though sometimes "the information is taken out at a gradual and logical rate." The principle is most evident in his three works for four pianos, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla, all from around 1979. The last of these appropriates Martin Luther's hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," as a gay manifesto.[2] In 1976, Eastman participated in a performance of Eight Songs for a Mad King conducted by Pierre Boulez at Lincoln Center. He served as the first male vocalist in Meredith Monk's ensemble, as documented on her influential album Dolmen Music (1981). He fostered a strong kinship and collaboration with Arthur Russell, conducting nearly all of his orchestral recordings (compiled as First Thought Best Thought [Audika Records, 2006]) and participating (as organist and vocalist) in the recording of 24-24 Music (1982; released under the imprimatur of Dinosaur L), a controversial disco-influenced composition that included the underground dance hits "Go Bang!" and "In the Cornbelt"; both featured Eastman's trademark bravado.
During this period, he also played in a jazz ensemble with his brother Gerry, who previously played guitar in the Count Basie Orchestra. He also coordinated the Brooklyn Philharmonic's outreach-oriented Community Concert Series (performed by the CETA Orchestra and funded by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts) in conjunction with Foss and other composers of color. By 1980, he was regularly touring across the United States and internationally; a recording of a performance from that year at Northwestern University was released on the posthumous compilation Unjust Malaise (2005).[1]
A 1981 piece for Eastman's cello ensemble, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, was performed at The Kitchen in New York City. In 1986, the choreographer Molissa Fenley set her dance, Geologic Moments, to music of Philip Glass and two works by Eastman (an unknown work for two pianos and "One God" in which Eastman sang and played piano), which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Despondent about what he saw as a dearth of worthy professional opportunities, Eastman grew increasingly dependent on drugs after 1983. His life fell apart; many of his scores were impounded by the New York City Sheriff's Office following an eviction in the early 1980s, further impeding his professional development. While homeless, he briefly took refuge in Tompkins Square Park. His hope for a lectureship at Cornell University also failed to materialize during this period.
Despite a temporary attempt at a comeback, Eastman died alone at the age of 49 in Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, New York of cardiac arrest. No public notice was given to his death until an obituary by Kyle Gann appeared in the Village Voice; it was dated January 22, 1991, eight months after Eastman died.[3] As Eastman's notational methods were loose and open to interpretation, revival of his music has been a difficult task, dependent on people who worked with him.
Style
Eastman's works often incorporate dramaturgical and suspenseful structures, slowly evolving and discordant aleatoric sections that symbolize self-doubt, trauma and mania, and deconstructed pop structures (particularly in Stay on It (1973) or The Holy Presence of Joan D'Arc (1981), which repeat but dramatically evolve catchy riffs). As well as this, his long-form piano pieces like Evil Nigger (1979) and Gay Guerrilla (c. 1980) highlight his intent to dramatically explore his black and gay identity through motifs that, in tone and repetition, represent heightening conflict. More particularly, Eastman described his own style of minimalism as 'organic music'[4]; a style of 'gradual accrual and accumulation, often followed by gradual disintegration'[4], where he would gradually and sometimes abruptly alter repeated phrases to create the basis for his works.
Artistic legacy
The composer Mary Jane Leach has found scores by Eastman and posted them to her website.[5]
In June 2006, the New York-based group Ne(x)tworks presented their score realization (by Cornelius Dufallo and Chris McIntyre) of Eastman's Stay On It at the ISSUE Project Room silo space on Carroll Street in Brooklyn.
In 2007 the California E A R Unit gave a performance of Crazy Nigger at REDCAT (The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex).
Eastman's piece Crazy Nigger was performed March 15, 2008, during 7th Edition Dag in de Branding Festival, The Hague, the Netherlands.[6]
On February 10, 2012, Luciano Chessa curated for Sarah Cahill's L@te Series of the Berkeley Art Museum/PFA the first Eastman retrospective. The concert included the performance of Eastman's Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla for six pianos, Eastman's last known composition, Our Father, and the first live performance of the Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, transcribed by bass Richard Mix under Chessa's invitation. The event also included Chessa's DJ live set of NY house music recordings featuring Eastman and his collaborators. The preview piece for this event in the SF Chronicle, by Joshua Kosman, is the first full writeup on Eastman ever to appear in a major US newspaper.[7]
On March 26, 2013, New Amsterdam Records released an album by Jace Clayton entitled The Julius Eastman Memory Depot. The album includes performances of "Evil Nigger" and "Gay Guerilla" by David Friend and Emily Manzo that have been manipulated and re-arranged by Clayton. The album's final track is a tribute to the late composer titled, "Callback from the American Society of Eastman Supporters."[8]
Performer/Composer Amy Knoles recently created a 4.0 solo live electronic version of Crazy Nigger. She toured the Pacific Northwest and Europe in the Fall of 2013, with a program called Julius Eastman FOUND.[9] She performed on the MalletKat with an elaborate system of loops, developed in Ableton LIVE with the Keith McMillen 12Step foot controller.
Lutosławski Piano Duo (Emilia Sitarz and Bartek Wąsik) have been performing his compositions regularly since 2014. Their repertoire contains "Evil Nigger" and "Gay Guerilla" (with Joanna Duda and Mischa Kozłowski). The premiere of their version of "Crazy Nigger" will take place in December during KWADROFONIK FESTIVAL in Warsaw.
In October 2015, Bowerbird, a Philadelphia-based non-profit presented Eastman's "Crazy Nigger" as the first event in a multi-year survey of the composer's work.[10]
A biography of Eastman, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, was released in December 2015.[11]
A larger Eastman retrospective took place at the London Contemporary Music Festival in December 2016, and included the presentation of seven Eastman works, several pieces closely associated with Eastman and an exhibition, spread over three nights.
On January 24, 2017, an evening of Eastman's works were presented as "A portrait of Julius Eastman" at the long-running modern classical music series, Monday Evening Concerts, in Los Angeles. The program consisted of "Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc" for solo baritone singer, "The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc" for ten cellos and "Crazy Nigger" for four pianos. The concert was very well received by a nearly sold out audience in the Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School for the Performing Arts.
MaerzMusik 2017 opened with three of Julius Eastman’s works for four pianos on March 17. Furthermore, from 17th to 26 March, the space of SAVVY Contemporary became a documentation center dedicated to the oeuvre of Julius Eastman.
In May 2017, after more than three years of research, Bowerbird presented "That Which Is Fundamental" - a four-concert retrospective and month-long exhibition of Eastman's work. Included in the festival were the modern premieres of several of Eastman's early works, including "Macle" and "Thruway". This project was the first retrospective produced in collaboration with the Eastman Estate.[12]
In February 2018 Luciano Chessa completed his edition of the Symphony No. II. The Faithful Friend, The Lover Friend's Love for the Beloved, Eastman's only work for large orchestra. On November 20 Chessa conducted Mannes Orchestra in the premiere of Eastman II at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in NYC to a considerable acclaim. The preview piece in The New York Times featured clips from the rehearsal of the piece[13], and a review followed [14]
In March 2018, MaerzMusik Festival as well as SAVVY Contemporary Berlin continued their interdisciplinary project on Julius Eastman with a series of German premieres of his pieces as well as world-premieres of newly commissioned pieces – in a series of concerts, an exhibition and a symposium with Mary Jane Leach, George E. Lewis, Christine Rusiniak, Kodwo Eshun, Rocco Di Pietro, and many others.[15]
In 2018 visual artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden curated an exhibition based on her research around Eastman at New York's The Kitchen. It included performances of his work and work of contemporary artists inspired by Eastman including Carolyn Lazard, Sondra Perry, and Chloe Bass and others.[16][17]
In 2018 visual artist Michael Anthony Garcia and composer Russell Reed performed Femenine with the Austin Chamber Music Festival.
Known works
- Piano Pieces I - IV (1968) for solo piano
- Thruway (1970) for flute, clarinet, trombone, violin, cello, soprano solo, off stage jazz trio, SATB choir, electronics
- The Moon's Silent Modulation (1970) for dancers, vocalists and chamber ensemble
- Touch Him When (1970) for piano 4 hands
- Trumpet (1970) for 7 trumpets
- Macle (1971) for voices and electronics
- Comp 1 (1971) for solo flute
- Mumbaphilia (1972) for solo performer and dancers
- Wood in Time (1972) for 8 metronomes
- Tripod (1972) instrumentation unknown, score fragment for one treble voice and one tape part exists
- Colors (1973) for 14 women's voices and tape
- Stay on It (1973) for no fixed instrumentation, although piano, percussion, and voice were always included
- 440 (1973) for voice, violin, viola and double bass
- That Boy (1974) for small instrumental ensemble
- Joy Boy (1974) for 4 treble instruments
- Femenine (1974) for chamber ensemble
- Masculine (1974) for small instrumental ensemble
- If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? (1977) for violin, 2 French horns, 4 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, piano, 2 chimes and 2 basses
- Nigger Faggot (1978) for bell. percussion, and strings
- Dirty Nigger (1978) for 2 flutes, 2 saxophones, bassoon, 3 violins, and 2 double basses
- Evil Nigger (1979) for any number of similar instruments, most commonly 4 pianos
- Gay Guerilla (ca. 1980) for any number of similar instruments, most commonly 4 pianos
- Crazy Nigger (ca. 1980) for any number of similar instruments, most commonly 4 pianos
- The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc (1981) for ten cellos
- Untitled [Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc] (1981) for solo voice
- His Most Qualityless Majesty (1983) for piano and voice
- Hail Mary (1984) for voice and piano
- Buddha (1983) for unspecified instrumentation
- Piano 2 (1986) for solo piano
- Our Father (1989) for 2 male voices
Recordings
- 2018 - Piano Interpretations performed by Kukuruz Quartet (Intakt Records)
- 2017 - Stay on It performed by Abdu Ali and Horse Lords
- 2016 - Femenine performed by the SEM Ensemble (Frozen Reeds)
- 2014 - "Unchained" performed by Lutosławski Piano Duo and Friends - (pieces by Julius Eastman and Tomasz Sikorski) Bołt Records
- 2014 - Piano 2 performed by Joseph Kubera on Book of Horizons (New World 80745)
- 2005 - Unjust Malaise, by various artists (New World 80638) (Includes Stay On It; If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich; Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc; The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc; Gay Guerrilla; Evil Nigger; Crazy Nigger; and Spoken Introduction to Northwestern University Concert)
- 1987 - Davies, Peter Maxwell. Miss Donnithorne's Maggot; Eight Songs for a Mad King. London: Unicorn-Kanchana. (Includes Julius Eastman, baritone.)
- 1983 - Monk, Meredith. Turtle Dreams (Includes Julius Eastman, organ.)
- 1982 - Dinosaur L. 24→24 Music (Includes Julius Eastman, keyboards and voice.)
- 1981 - Monk, Meredith. Dolmen Music. (Includes Julius Eastman, percussion and voice.)
- 1972 - Kolb, Barbara, and Richard Moryl. New York: Desto. (Includes Julius Eastman, narrator, on Side A.)
Further reading
Levine Packer, Renée, and Mary Jane Leach. Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music. University of Rochester Press, 2015. ISBN 9781580465342.References
- "After Years of Research, Minimalist Composer Julius Eastman Gets the Tribute He Deserves". Hyperallergic. May 17, 2017. Retrieved August 8, 2018.
External links
- The Julius Eastman Project
- Julius Eastman That Which Is Fundamental
- Interview and solo vocal performance by Julius Eastman from 1984
- Julius Eastman: "Touch Him When" (9:20) A piano four hands composition played by the composer and Steve Marrow published in 1984 on Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
spoken article (help·info)
THE MUSIC OF JULIUS EASTMAN: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH JULIUS EASTMAN:
Julius Eastman: Evil Nigger (1979) 1/2
Julius Eastman - Crazy Nigger (1979)
Julius Eastman - Femenine (1974)
Julius Eastman - Unjust Malaise (full album)
Eastman - Gay Guerrilla [Audio + Score]
Julius Eastman: Stay on It (1973)
Julius Eastman - Music for "Geologic Moments"
Julius Eastman – Femenine, performed by Kymatic ensemble
Julius Eastman: Crazy Nigger (1979) 1/5
Julius Eastman: Gay Guerilla
Julius Eastman Gay Guerrilla (1979) Time's Arrow
Julius Eastman: Gay Guerrilla at Kunsthalle Basel
Kukuruz Quartet plays Julius Eastman
Eastman - Crazy N****r [Audio + Score]
Julius Eastman | A tribute to Julius Eastman (1940-1990)
Excerpts: Julius Eastman in Zürich
https://spinningonair.org/episode-2-julius-eastman/
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
(Duration: 1:02:37 — 57.4MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | RSS
A rare interview with composer/vocalist Julius Eastman, plus a solo vocal performance by Eastman not heard since 1984.
Eastman was a vivid, completely unique musician who died homeless in 1990. As a gay African-American, he brought a different perspective to experimental music. His philosophical, religious, musical, and sensual passions led him far from the mainstream, and the legacy of his music was lost, ignored, and forgotten for years after his early death. More recently, a new awareness of Eastman’s music has arisen, and the world seems finally ready now to appreciate his work.
David Garland’s 1984 interview with Eastman is apparently one of the few recorded interviews Eastman did, and it’s unforgettable. Also, illuminating Eastman’s new influence on young composers today, David speaks with Jace Clayton, aka DJ Rupture, about his “Julius Eastman Memory Depot.”
Eastman was a vivid, completely unique musician who died homeless in 1990. As a gay African-American, he brought a different perspective to experimental music. His philosophical, religious, musical, and sensual passions led him far from the mainstream, and the legacy of his music was lost, ignored, and forgotten for years after his early death. More recently, a new awareness of Eastman’s music has arisen, and the world seems finally ready now to appreciate his work.
David Garland’s 1984 interview with Eastman is apparently one of the few recorded interviews Eastman did, and it’s unforgettable. Also, illuminating Eastman’s new influence on young composers today, David speaks with Jace Clayton, aka DJ Rupture, about his “Julius Eastman Memory Depot.”
Explore
- Garland’s 1980 Ear Magazine review of Eastman‘s “Sacred Songs” performance
- poster for The Festival of Voices, 1984
- Mary Jane Leach’s Julius Eastman Project
- “Performing the Music of Julius Eastman,” a fifty-page pdf from the University of Buffalo Music Library
- Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (Amazon), book edited by Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach
- album details, including liner notes, for Unjust Malaise, 3-cd set of Eastman’s music
- “Julius Eastman’s Guerrilla Minimalism,” by Alex Ross in The New Yorker
- “Minimalist Composer Julius Eastman, Dead for 26 Years, Crashes the Canon,” by Zachary Woolfe in the New York Times
- “Julius Eastman: the groundbreaking composer America almost forgot,” by Andrew Male in The Guardian
- jaceclayton.com
Photo of Julius Eastman from Ear Magazine archives; photographer unknown. Eastman’s likeness used by permission from the Julius Eastman estate / background image: Chris Garland
