Two more archival recordings have recently surfaced: Femenine, an extended, incantatory work from 1974 for chamber ensemble and a motorized sleigh bell and The Zürich Concert, an improvised piano recital from 1980. (The title is an anagram of his name, created by the composer David Borden.) Thanks in large part to Leach’s archival work, Eastman is now lionized in the art world and academia as a visionary practitioner of “intersectionality,” a queer black saint like James Baldwin. The composer Mary Jane Leach, an Eastman acquaintance and fan, spent a decade tracking them down, and in 2005 released a revelatory compilation, Unjust Malaise. When Eastman died, only a few recordings of his powerful singing were available, and none of his compositions.Īs it turned out, there were Eastman recordings, some stored in university libraries, others hidden away in private collections. He told his friend Ned Sublette, a composer and author, that the music he had made reflected an “inconsistent period,” best forgotten, and it nearly was. Wandering the streets in flowing garments and a turban, he looked like another sad-eyed prophet of the Lower East Side. He lost nearly all his scores, and appeared to show as little concern for his musical legacy as he did for his health. When he showed up at concerts, it was to ask his friends for loans. Playing his music, he felt “as if I am trying to see myself-it’s like diving into the earth.”īy the early 1980s, Eastman was smoking crack and sleeping in Tompkins Square Park. Eastman was among the first minimalists to dispense with the movement’s ascetic preoccupation with “process” in favor of expressive fireworks and a visceral, even messy grandiosity, qualities that prefigured the “post-minimalist” work of composers like John Adams. Eastman toured the piece throughout Europe and was nominated for a Grammy for the recording.Īs a composer, Eastman gravitated to the movement known as minimalism, but while his music shared some of the features typical of minimalism (a steady pulse, repetitive structures), it bristled with dissonances and improvisation, neither of which could be heard in the tonal, fastidiously structured early compositions of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Imposing in his royal brocaded gown and furred cap, he created an astonishing impression of delirium, using his five-octave range to produce a clamor of squawks, cackles, roars, and cries. By 1970 he was an underground hero, thanks to his electrifying performance as King George III in Peter Maxwell Davies’s music theater piece Eight Songs for a Mad King. In 1966, he gave his first solo piano recital at Town Hall and sang in Der Rosenkavalier with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Wiry and graceful, with some of the only dreadlocks to be found in the very white world of new music, he commanded attention by his presence alone, but he was also a musician of extraordinary gifts to whom success came early. “What I am trying to achieve,” he said, “is to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.” A pianist, singer, and composer, Eastman was both black and gay, and proclaimed his identities in brazenly titled compositions such as Crazy Nigger, Gay Guerrilla, and Nigger Faggot. A prominent figure on the experimental music scene throughout the 1970s, he ended his life an invisible man, his name all but erased from musical history, as if his short, dazzling career and his fiercely original art had been a collective hallucination.Įastman’s disappearance was no small achievement, for it was hard to imagine a more visible figure: his aim was not merely to make himself heard but to make himself seen. Kyle Gann published a moving obituary eight months later in The Village Voice, but his passing was otherwise unremarked. A year later, Eastman died of heart failure in a hospital in Buffalo, where he’d first made a name for himself as a composer. Eastman, who said he played piano at the men’s shelter across the street, surprised the reporter by speaking about the case “with greater intelligence than anyone in a Giorgio Armani suit.” The reporter wondered “how such an articulate fellow wound up warming his piano player’s fingers over a street fire, waiting for the shelter to open.” “That’s too long of a story,” Eastman replied. The day before, a young female doctor, five months pregnant, had been raped and murdered inside the hospital. On a cold winter day in 1989, Julius Eastman huddled in a group of homeless men outside Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, warming his hands by an oil-drum fire, when a reporter from Newsday approached him.
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