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No one can deny that Julius Eastman had a unique voice, both literally and compositionally. Figures such as Kyle Gann, Mary Jane Leach, and Diamanda Galas have all singled out Eastman's music as being inimitable and unforgettable. However, until recently there has been little study of what distinguishes his voice. At first glance, an openly gay African-American composer, championed by the likes of Morton Feldman and Lukas Foss, would provide ample avenues to explore his work both analytically and hermeneutically. But his erratic career, the dispersion of his scores, and the cryptic nature of those scores that have been found, make the performance or even cursory knowledge of his works, much less intensive analysis, tremendously difficult. The work of Leach, Joseph Kubera, and Cees van Zeeland constitute a concentration of materials concerning Eastman's late 1970s work Crazy Nigger. Several of the techniques Eastman used in this work are salient to the listener, such as his bracing dissonance and the obscuring of minimalism's omnipresent pulse. Through analysis, the origins of these qualities reveal themselves to be extended tonalities more akin to Stravinsky and Bartok than the French symbolists, ragas, and modal jazz that informed earlier minimalists, as well as a larger overall additive process Eastman called “organic music.”
My analysis is based on three sources. The first is a facsimile of an autograph score from Mary Jane Leach's online compilation of Eastman's scores. The second is a live recording available on the New World Records CD set Unjust Malaise. This recording dates from a concert given at Northwestern University as part of his residency there in January 1980, which featured Eastman as one of four pianists performing Crazy Nigger, along with two identically scored works: Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla. Like many contemporary minimalist composers, Eastman's scores were never intended for transmission as much as they were mnemonic reminders for his own performances. Thus, either a recording or the memories of performers are vital for the resolution from the score into sounding music.
Composer-performer Julius Eastman (1940-90) was an enigma, both comfortable and uncomfortable in the many worlds he inhabited: black, white, gay, straight, classical music, disco, academia, and downtown New York. His music, insistent and straightforward, resists labels and seethes with a tension that resonates with musicians, scholars, and audiences today. Eastman's provocative titles, including Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and others assault us with his obsessions. Eastman tested limits with his political aggressiveness, as recounted in legendary scandals he unleashed like his June 1975 performance of John Cage's Song Books, which featured homoerotic interjections, or the uproar over his titles at Northwestern University. These episodes areexamples of Eastman's persistence in pushing the limits of the acceptable in the highly charged arenas of sexual and civil rights.
In addition to analyses of Eastman's music, the essays in Gay Guerrilla provide background on his remarkable life history and the era's social landscape. The book presents an authentic portrait of a notable American artist that is compelling reading for the general reader as well as scholars interested in twentieth-century American music, American studies, gay rights, and civil rights.
Contributors: David Borden, Luciano Chessa, Ryan Dohoney, Kyle Gann, Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek, R. Nemo Hill, Mary Jane Leach, Renée Levine Packer, George E. Lewis, Matthew Mendez, John Patrick Thomas
Renée Levine Packer's book This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music in Buffalo received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence. Mary Jane Leach is a composer and freelance writer, currently writing music and theatre criticism for the Albany Times-Union.