This commentary is by John R. Killacky of South Burlington, an outgoing state representative and the author of “because art: commentary, critique, & conversation.”
In 1970s New York, Julius Eastman was an outrageous presence in the avant-garde performance scene as a composer, singer and pianist. Black and openly gay, he was an outsider. He died homeless and forgotten in 1990.
As the music world grapples with righting the canon, there is a resurgence of interest in this sui generis artist.
He was nominated for a Grammy for his recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’s ”Eight Songs for a Mad King” (1974) and was as easily at home performing with Meredith Monk on ”Dolmen Music” (1979). Monk fondly recalled Eastman in a conversation, saying he was “full of contradictions, but so intelligent with an essential love and devotion to music itself. He taught me a lot about theory and harmony.”
Eastman’s own compositions challenged prevailing aesthetic norms that were very straight, very white, and very male. Eastman told The Buffalo Times in 1976 that he aspired “to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.”
While classically trained in voice and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, structurally his music was proto-minimalist, frequently using multiple grand pianos awash in overtones. He called it “organic music.”
While his titles were sometimes provocative — “Crazy (N-word)” (1978) and “Gay Guerilla” (1979) among them — the music itself was transcendent. He conducted his 1974 symphony “Femenine” wearing a dress. Vocal and piano scores as well as disco recordings round out his genre-fluid oeuvre.
Whether onstage, in gay clubs, or working at Tower Records, Eastman’s outsized personality captured the public’s gaze. However, he became increasingly erratic, struggling economically and with substance abuse. Evicted for nonpayment of rent in the early 1980s, sheriffs threw out his scores, papers and belongings. He lived in homeless shelters and outdoors in a city park when not couch-surfing with friends, while still performing and composing sporadically.
Meredith Monk said he would occasionally show up at her loft at odd hours, and she would feed him. “Afterward we would play four-handed piano pieces and one night sang the Henry Purcell songbook,” she reminisced.
Monk loaned her upstate cottage to him for three months. “He was not of this earth, just needed someone to take care of him.”
In 1986, choreographer Molissa Fenley commissioned Eastman to create a score for two sections of her “Geologic Moments” (1986) performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music. She told me: “Working with Julius was always surprising. I often had to telephone his brother to find him for rehearsals.”
Backstage, he would be fast asleep in his dressing room. “He was very sick at the time, but once on stage, he’d be unbelievable, brilliant, completely obsessed. People loved him.”
He eventually disappeared from Manhattan and died destitute in a Buffalo hospital in 1990 at age 49. An obituary was published in The Village Voice eight months later, so unsure were people whether he was dead or alive.
Eastman’s legacy languished in limbo until native Vermonter and UVM alum composer Mary Jane Leach produced a three-CD set of his archival recordings, “Unjust Malaise,” in 2005. Leach and others then published a book of essays, “Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music,” in 2015.
Her efforts jumpstarted a resurgence of performances of his work, first in alternative spaces and then by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Orchestra of St. Luke’s. American Modern Opera Company guest-curated some of his music at the June 2022 Ojai Music Festival in Southern California.
The contemporary music collective Wild Up has also been championing Eastman’s compositions, committing to a seven-part anthology on New Amsterdam Records. Last year, they released “Julius Eastman Vol. 1: Femenine,” which was hailed as a “masterpiece” by The New York Times. NPR placed it among the top 10 records of 2021.
The propulsive 70-minute symphony, built on circular phrasing and expanding repetitions, generates an ecstatically immersive experience of cascading lyricism.
In June, Wild Up released “Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy.” His idiosyncratic compositional style — open-ended scores that interweave multiple genres and whose instrumentation is not always specified — is lovingly realized by artists whose backgrounds encompass classical, jazz and improvisational music. Exuberance abounds throughout this recording.
Here in Vermont, string players from Vermont Symphony Orchestra performed Eastman’s “Gay Guerrilla” in a program featuring music written by LGBTQ composers for Montpelier Pride in June. Program notes contextualize his piece as “a call for strength in adversity, written just as the AIDS epidemic was emerging.”
And Vermont Public’s classical music host James Stewart is midway through presenting an illuminating 10-part series examing the composer’s life and music for the station’s Timeline program. I am included in these conversations with Stewart, along with composers Mary Jane Leach and Daniel Bernard Roumain, among others.
Julius Eastman, the fierce, Black, gay iconoclast, consigned to oblivion in his day, is finally being celebrated for his musical genius and the sheer audacity of his compositions.
Editor’s note: This post has been updated to remove a racist slur from a song title to be in line with VTDigger’s current editorial standards.
