Since the new music community's rediscovery of Julius Eastman with the 2005 release of Unjust Malaise, Stay On It has quickly rushed to the head of the pack in listener popularity sweepstakes. Among critics, Mark Swed hails the music as “intensely personal” and “radically ahead of its time.” Steve Smith deems it a “potent metaphor” for the virtues of “crosspollination and collaboration.” And most colorfully of all, Paul Muller affectionately likens the piece to “a slightly out of control street party.” Nor has Eastman's resourceful fusion of relentless pulsation and elements of free improvisation failed to catch the imagination of young, open-eared performers. Captivated by the archival recordings in Unjust Malaise, the artistic directors of the experimental ensembles thingNY and Ne(x)tworks have independently undertaken to “realize” the music in live performance. Without their efforts, it is hard to imagine that Stay On It would have been selected as the representative Eastman composition on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's second Minimalist Jukebox festival in April 2014—the first “official” recognition of Eastman's belated entrée into the minimalist canon. All mighty impressive for a piece whose score is lost.

Yet the task of reconstructing Stay On It is hardly as straightforward as all that. For starters, the piece was not originally rehearsed in traditional “new music” fashion. Following the example set by the composerled ensembles of the 1960s (such as those of Cornelius Cardew and Steve Reich), and anticipating the techniques soon to be favored by the so-called downtown movement, Eastman's working methods were marked by forms of what Walter J. Ong has termed “secondary orality.”