We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
A considerable portion of Joan La Barbara's compositional work has been concentrated in her ‘sound paintings’ – works that translate into sound the visual and energetic sensation La Barbara experiences when encountering art. Many of these works are ‘ekphrastic’ – that is, they render aurally a pre-existing work. In this article, I analyse three such sound paintings: Klee Alee (based on Paul Klee's Hauptweg und Nebenwege), Rothko (based on Mark Rothko's Chapel paintings), and In solitude this fear is lived (inspired by the early work of Agnes Martin). I argue that these works extend the mimetic impulse of her vocal practice and use translational semiosis to produce their ekphrastic effects.
In a press release announcing a performance at The Kitchen in 1981, Julius Eastman provided a succinct autobiography:
I have sung, played, and written music for a very long time, and the end is not in sight. I sang as a boy soprano and I still sing as a boy soprano 30 years later. I have played the old masters on the pianoforte and have appreciated their help and guidance. But now music is only one of my attributes. I could be a Dancer, Choreographer, Painter or any other kind of artist if I so wished; but right thought, speech and action are now my main concerns. No other thing is as important or as useful. Right thought, Right Speech, Right action, Right music.
Eastman's self-assessment evinces a broad engagement with creative and expressive culture as he practiced it up to that point in his life. Eastman's autobiography speaks to a widely distributed and multiply directed aesthetic practice, one that explored networks of thought, speech, and action cutting across genres, styles, and communities. Nowhere is this more evident than in Eastman's time in New York's downtown scene in the years 1976–90.
Two examples from his performing repertoire in the 1970s demonstrate this plurality. Eastman had, in the early 1970s, become the chief performer of Peter Maxwell Davies's theater piece Eight Songs for a Mad King, through performances with the Creative Associates and his recording with Maxwell Davies's ensemble the Fires of London. This piece remained Eastman's claim to fame throughout the 1970s, and he sang it with other ensembles, including the Brooklyn Philharmonia under the direction of Lukas Foss, and the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez. Yet at the same time, Eastman could also be heard singing avant-garde disco at The Kitchen. His recording with the group Dinosaur L, a loose dance music collective organized by composer-performer-producer Arthur Russell, extended the reach of Eastman's voice beyond high culture institutions to downtown's mostly gay dance clubs. Within Dinosaur L, Eastman's keyboard work was a powerful force, holding down the groove, as well as inflecting the songs with out-there improvisations on record.
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.