New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Eastman Holy Presence
When minimalist composer Julius Eastman died of cardiac abort in a Buffalo hospital in 1990, the 49-year-old had been homeless for about of a decade. His obituary in the Village Voice wouldn't appear till eight months afterward. He'd lost most of his possessions (probably including his scores) when he lost his apartment, and no commercial recordings of his pieces existed. It became nearly impossible for musicians to play his work, or for listeners to hear information technology. In life, Eastman had been unforgettable: outspoken, provocative, brilliant, unapologetically queer and black. But the lonely circumstances of his expiry threatened to erase him from retentiveness.
Non everyone could forget such a powerful personality, of grade, and years of dogged and loving inquiry—by people who'd known Eastman and those who'd only heard the stories—uncovered fractional scores, long-neglected tapes in university libraries, and other fragments of his output. And so far less than half of his catalog has been recovered, only in 2005 the starting time of many commercial releases of Eastman's music finally appeared: a three-CD set of archival textile called Unjust Malaise (New World). In 2015 the University of Rochester Press published a collection of Eastman scholarship. Recent events devoted to Eastman's music and life include a December 2016 serial past the London Gimmicky Music Festival, a January 2017 programme by Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, and two iterations of a festival chosen Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental, one last spring in Philadelphia and the other this year in New York. It's all part of an upwelling of involvement in the composer that surpasses anything he enjoyed when he was alive.
Eastmania, equally this phenomenon is sometimes known, arrives in Chicago in forcefulness this week. On the afternoon of Sunday, February 25, the Frequency Festival (programmed by Reader critic Peter Margasak) hosts the metropolis's first Julius Eastman portrait concert, curated by Chicago cellist Seth Parker Woods and held at the Cultural Heart's Preston Bradley Hall.
Julius Eastman portrait concert
Part of the Frequency Festival, programmed by Peter Margasak
Program curated by Seth Parker Woods, with performances of Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc (for solo voice), The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc (for ten cellists), and Gay Guerrilla (for multiple pianos)
Dominicus 2/25, two PM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Eye, 78 Eastward. Washington, free, all-ages
As a composer, Eastman good an ecstatic, emphatic, and sometimes militant grade of minimalism, somewhen developing what he chosen "organic music"—a style of gradual accrual and accumulation, often followed by gradual disintegration. He was also a bass singer of extraordinary depth and dexterity, and as a performer and improviser he traversed a variety of musical communities in New York: non just minimalism but too gratuitous jazz and disco. Those who remember Eastman adjure to the luminescence of his artistry, his inimitable and sometimes outrageous personality, and his lifelong preoccupation with spirituality. He aimed to live an outsize life, and summed upwards his platonic in a 1976 Buffalo News interview: "Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest."
Eastman'south legacy is still existence pieced together today. Mary Jane Leach, a fellow performer and composer on New York'due south downtown music scene in the 80s, has led much of the try to recover his lost music. She assembled the recordings on Unjust Malaise by searching libraries at SUNY Buffalo and Northwestern University as well as the collections of private individuals. With musicologist Renée Levine Packer, she edited the 2015 anthology Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, named after 1 of the composer'due south best-known works.
Beginning in the belatedly 90s, Leach and many others laid the groundwork for the accelerating Eastman revival: over nearly ii decades, they played exhausting rounds of telephone tag with potential sources and made countless inquiries and annal searches, hitting nigh as many dead ends. Leach might hear that someone had a tape of a long-ago Eastman radio broadcast, but to observe the cassette box empty. If she actually located a tape, it might be too degraded to salvage. Composer and producer Chris McIntyre reconstructed the Eastman piece Trumpet by consulting a blurry photo and transcribing a 1971 recording. The pursuit has even so to cease, and it continues to bear fruit: recent Eastman releases include the 1974 recording Femenine (Frozen Reeds, 2016) and a 1980 performance packaged every bit Julius Eastman: The Zürich Concert (New World, 2017).
At a Jan 27 concert hosted by Manhattan arts infinite the Kitchen, jazz guitarist Gerry Eastman (who controls Julius's estate) began the evening with a lengthy remembrance of his younger brother. The event was part of the New York installment of That Which Is Fundamental, organized by Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Dustin Injure for Philadelphia arts nonprofit Bowerbird. The festival ran January 19 through February 10 and included not but a concert serial (featuring the composer's work and newly commissioned pieces inspired by his life) but likewise an Eastman exhibit with archived reviews, audio interviews, and rare photos.
Equally Gerry told it, the siblings grew up in Ithaca, New York, where Julius showed involvement in the family piano at an early on age. His mother encouraged him to take lessons, and his instructor urged him to bring together an Episcopal choir, where he served every bit pianist and a male child soprano; he also participated in glee club throughout inferior high and high school. Eastman attended Ithaca College for a year, then left in September 1959 for Philadelphia'due south prestigious Curtis Institute of Music—ane of the near selective conservatories in the world, in role because its students don't pay tuition. At the time, the schoolhouse housed students with local families rather than in dorms, but no family would host Eastman. (It's worth remembering that the Civil Rights Deed was all the same five years away.) He was so hell-bent on getting a musical education that until his graduation in May 1963 he lived in a claustrophobic room at the local YMCA.
Eastman moved in spring 1967 to Buffalo, at the time a thriving center for gimmicky music. Renée Levine Packer was then working in SUNY Buffalo's music department. "Julius Eastman appeared in my office unannounced one day—a slim, handsome blackness man of medium tiptop dressed in a long army-green trench coat and white sneakers, carrying some music scores under his arm," she recalls in Gay Guerrilla. In September 1969, Eastman established a formal amalgamation with the schoolhouse's Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, condign a Creative Associate (today the SUNY Buffalo music library is the primary source for archival Eastman material). In fall 1970 he joined Petr Kotik's Due south.East.M. Ensemble, the group whose 1974 rendition of his piece Femenine was released in 2016. Eastman too became office of the university'southward music department, pedagogy music theory.
During this flow Eastman performed extensively as a pianist and vocalizer, presenting works by luminaries such equally Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, and Alvin Lucier. (Afterwards in the 70s, he'd stage concerts with Meredith Monk, Carman Moore, Tania León, Arthur Russell, and others.) At the Aspen Music Festival in July 1970, Eastman sang the U.South. premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies'southward Eight Songs for a Mad King, a demanding work that showcased his vocal agility and theatrical range. Subsequently that year in the Britain he made a studio recording of the piece that was nominated for a Grammy in 1973.
Most notoriously, Eastman caused a pocket-sized scandal at the 1975 June in Buffalo festival while performing John Muzzle's Song Books. Loosely interpreting Muzzle'southward already loose direction to "perform a disciplined action," Eastman brought a man and a woman onstage, then theatrically and erotically undressed the man (the woman refused). Cage treated his own homosexuality every bit a private matter, and he was incensed—the Zen saint of the avant-garde, famous for letting sounds exist sounds, apparently had a tougher time letting people be people. Merely Eastman saw no distinction between experimenting in his music and negotiating his identity. As Northwestern professor Ryan Dohoney noted in a 2014 academic newspaper, "Eastman, like numerous queer musicians before him . . . used his compositions, improvisations, and performances as modes of creating gay life."
When Eastman moved to New York Urban center in the tardily 1970s, his work began to reflect this negotiation—most plainly in the confrontational titles he gave his pieces, which sometimes provoked violent backlash. During an Eastman residency at Northwestern University in early 1980, the school posted concert announcements that listed the works he'd present: Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla. According to a 2011 history of the residency by Eastman scholar Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek, black student alliance For Members Only challenged the titles as "racist," threatened to protest the concert, and demanded a meeting with Eastman and Peter Gena, director of Northwestern's Gimmicky Music Ensemble. Eastman and Gena agreed that public announcements and posters would instead listing the event as "New Music for Iv Pianos." Eastman didn't change the titles, just he shared them merely inside the concert hall.
To explicate himself, Eastman opened his January 1980 concert with a spoken introduction, which appears on Unjust Malaise. "At present at that place was, there was a little problem with the titles of the pieces," he said. "There were some students and ane kinesthesia fellow member who felt that the titles were somehow derogatory in some manner, existence that the discussion 'nigger' is in it. . . . Now the reason that I use that particular word is because for me information technology has . . . what I telephone call a 'basicness' well-nigh information technology. . . . And what I hateful by 'niggers' is that thing which is key, that person or thing that obtains a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that thing which is superficial or, what tin can we say, elegant."
Music critic and composer Kyle Gann (a longtime Reader contributor) attended that concert, and recalls Eastman delivering "a wise, at-home speech communication." As confrontational equally the composer's ideas could be, his begetting was serene. "He carried himself calmly, and his deep bass phonation gave him a remarkable gravitas, similar an Old Testament prophet," Gann says. "His ideas were mode out of the mainstream and he expressed them fearlessly, only it was their content that provoked people, not his style."
Within just a few years, though, and still in his early 40s, Eastman seemed to sense that his life was coming to a close. He was evicted from his apartment in belatedly 1981 or early '82, at which point most of his holding were confiscated—likely including all the scores he still had. In a 1984 interview with radio host David Garland, recorded when he was globe-trotting between his female parent's and brother'southward homes, he described himself as in his "concluding phase." A kinesthesia job he'd hoped to country at Cornell University vicious through, and Eastman's drinking and drug apply picked up. He worked for a few months in the late 80s at a Tower Records in Manhattan, and according to his dominate in that location (Paul Tai, later of New Earth Records), Eastman was also in therapy. But he never establish a identify of his own again.
As Leach has noted, many of Eastman's works from this final period—some composed, some improvised—seem preoccupied with spiritual themes, such as Sacred Songs (1980), The Four Books of Confucius (1982), Buddha (1984), Ane God (1985-'86), and Our Male parent (1989). During these years, Eastman would announced in "all white toga-like garb," according to Packer, as "a tacit declaration of his spiritual effort."
Eastman'due south spirituality was combinative; though raised Christian, he had many guides. In the interview with Garland, he professed interest in parts of Zen and said he'd been reading the Koran and studying the works of Confucius and Lao Tzu. "I live like a wandering monk," he said. "I've been fighting with the Lord for a long, long, long, long time."
The works on this Sunday'southward plan convey Eastman's reverence equally well as a corresponding defiance. Offset is Gay Guerrilla (1979), followed by the solo vocal slice Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc and The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc (1981) for ten cellos. When Eastman premiered Gay Guerrilla at his Jan 1980 Northwestern concert, he explained its championship as well:
"These names, either I glorify them or they glorify me," Eastman said. "And in the case of 'guerrilla,' that glorifies 'gay.' . . . A guerrilla is someone who in whatever case is sacrificing his life for a point of view. And you know if there is a crusade, and if it is a bang-up cause, those who vest to that cause will sacrifice their blood considering without claret there is no cause. So therefore that is the reason that I employ 'gay guerrilla,' in hopes that I might be one if called upon to exist ane."
Composed for any number of identical instruments but most often performed on four pianos (as it was at Northwestern), Gay Guerrilla begins slowly and somberly—"like bells tolling," as concert curator Seth Parker Wood describes it. Over the course of twenty minutes information technology builds to a booming, brazen musical quotation of the Lutheran hymn "Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott" ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"). Though Eastman's piece is instrumental, the original hymn includes the lines "And though this world, with devils filled / Should threaten to disengage us / We will not fearfulness, for God hath willed / His truth to triumph through united states of america."
Eastman wrote Gay Guerrilla in 1979, ten years after the Stonewall riots and on the cusp of the devastating AIDS epidemic, as musicologist Luciano Chessa noted in his contribution to the book of the same proper name. Reflecting on this historical moment, Parker Woods points out that 1979 was just before "all hell broke loose" for the gay community, so that the precarious questions of "who could say what" and "who could come out" were newly fraught and unsettled.
Joan of Arc inspired Eastman as a symbol of the indestructibility of the human desire for dignity and freedom. As a leader of the French army during the Hundred Years' War, she was captured and put on trial by the English for heresy, theft, and cross-dressing, among other crimes. In her defense, she said she'd been obeying the voices of saints, but she was burned live in 1431. Almost 500 years later, she was canonized past the Roman Cosmic Church. When Eastman premiered The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc at the Kitchen in New York in April 1981, his program notes read in part:
"Honey Joan,
"Discover presented a piece of work of art, in your name, full of honor, integrity, and boundless courage. This work of art, like all works of fine art in your proper name, can never and volition never match your most inspired passion. . . . I offer information technology as a reminder to those who recollect that they tin destroy liberators past acts of treachery, malice, and murder. They forget that the heed has memory. They forget that Good Character is the foundation of all acts. They recall that no one sees the corruption of their deeds, and similar all organizations (especially governments and religious organizations), they oppress in society to perpetuate themselves. Their methods of oppression are legion, but when they find that their more than subtle methods are failing, they resort to murder. Even now in my own country, my own people, my ain time, gross oppression and murder still go along. Therefore I have your proper noun and meditate upon it, but not as much as I should."
In the piece's solo vocal prelude, Eastman names the saints that Joan heard: Saint Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine. And he repeats their admonition to her: "Joan, speak boldly when they question you."
The prelude and the slice itself were never performed together while Eastman was alive. He recorded himself improvising the prelude at his East Hamlet flat not long before he was evicted, and in the early 80s it was broadcast on the radio before a recording of The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc. Contemporary performers can duplicate that sequence only considering multiple scholars and performers accept transcribed the improvised prelude.
In the words of Parker Woods, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc is both "a phone call to prayer" and a "call to arms." Three of its 10 cellos (the three saints?) soar in a higher place the others with songlike voices, while the others maintain an insistent, nonstop pulse.
Today i of Eastman's nearly pop works, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc inspired Mary Jane Leach to begin her search for his music. She found a dub of that early 80s radio recording in the possession of composer C. Bryan Rulon, then acquired the principal tape through engineer Steve Cellum. The starting time two pages of its score she located in the collections of the New York Public Library'due south Performing Arts Research Center, where they ended up after Eastman failed to repossess them at the end of a 1982 exhibit. The sheet music almost frequently used today was transcribed from Cellum'south record by cellist Clarice Jensen.
Whatever transcription of a piece for x identical instruments is past necessity a painstaking job, and likely to upshot in an approximation of the original score at best. The dearest and labor that Jensen devoted to The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc parallel the time and free energy that endless people accept poured into this Eastman resurgence.
Parker Forest counts himself every bit part of the "new generation of champions" of the composer's music. He describes what draws him to it: "You can hear the fragility, you hear the struggle, just you hear—at the core of it—you hear beauty, and y'all hear farthermost experimentation . . . [reflecting] on many parts of life: the comedic, the sensitive, the serious, the strained. It'south all in there, you know, in all the different pieces I've heard or witnessed. And I recall now is the time. It's a music we demand to hear. [Eastman'due south] music is a social music; information technology's a commentary on the times . . . [P]eople are at present realizing over again."
Eastman sought to practise practiced. With his art he addressed moral, social, spiritual, and political questions, non just aesthetic ones. In an autobiographical blurb for a poster advertisement a 1981 concert, he referenced the Buddha's Eightfold Path: "Right thought, spoken language and action are now my main concerns. No other thing is every bit of import or as useful. Right thought, Right Speech, Right activity, Correct music."
This quest for "right music"—a fierce seeking after the discipline and wisdom necessary to create art that operates in alignment with moral truth—must be considered a major part of Eastman's legacy. He maintained it even through the lean years at the end of his career. "Not that many people are banging on my door for this or for that," he admitted in 1984, "then I'm mostly writing imaginary music. No 1'due south really commissioning me."
Information technology's not Eastman's piece of work that'due south changed since then. Audiences accept changed, slowly, as the public collectively interrogates its assumptions about whose music should be heard, whose voices should be amplified, and who should be permitted to live their lives to the fullest. The electric current fervor for his music suggests that club has begun to auscultate the truth he grasped, all the same fleetingly, more than iii decades ago. v
Kerry O'Brien is a lecturer in music and a Public Voices Fellow at Yale University.
Source: https://chicagoreader.com/music/the-world-catches-up-to-iconoclastic-composer-julius-eastman/
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