The astonishing thing about Julius Eastman, for those of us who knew him, is that his music rose from the dead. When he died, in May 1990 at the age of only forty-nine, no one in the music world knew about it for eight months. His friends had lost touch with him. He hadn't performed for years. The rumor was that he had been evicted from his Manhattan apartment and was living in Tompkins Square Park, his possessions scattered to the winds. I forget who mentioned to me they heard he’d died, but I researched and confirmed it, and wrote his obituary for the January 22, 1991, Village Voice. When I called to tell his friends, some were skeptical, because rumors of his death had circulated before.

Those of us who loved Eastman's music despaired that we would never hear it again. But thanks to the miracle of modern musicology, his music is back, recorded, and being played, and he has a place in history.

Eastman was a wiry, gay, African-American man with a sepulchral voice incommensurate with his slim figure. A phenomenal pianist and singer, he attended Ithaca College and the Curtis Institute, and was discovered in 1968 by Lukas Foss, who recruited him for the Creative Associates at the University at Buffalo. There was an amazing avant-garde energy in the Buffalo music scene at the time, coalesced around Foss, Morton Feldman, Petr Kotik, and others.

The first that most people outside of this scene heard of Eastman was through his electric 1973 recording of Eight Songs for a Mad King by British composer Peter Maxwell Davies, in which Eastman sang the part of King George III descending into dementia. Eastman was on his way to becoming an underground legend. I first saw him in 1974, when he and Kotik, aflutist and composer, played at Oberlin (where I was a student) as the S.E.M. Ensemble. Kotik played slow, randomized melodies on theflute, with Eastman singing a perfect fifth below, using long, mesmerizingly repetitive texts of Gertrude Stein. (Years later, Kotik told me that he started playing parallel fifths with Eastman to keep him in tune, and decided he liked the sound.)