Snippets of Eastman laughing appeared, poignantly, and as the musical energy built, the reel switched to depictions of Baltimore, 2020, during the protests after the murder of George Floyd. The audience’s attention could wander productively, too: a video created by Kham Owens and Ashanti Soldier interwove moving depictions of Black life and art-making from circa 1940-the date of Eastman’s birth-to the present. As the piece grew heavily dissonant, each instrument handed off short motifs to the next, a style that seemed more visually present in the string septet version than in the one with pianos. Jessie Montgomery led the ensemble as a dynamic first violin, starting from the beginning tremors of octaves and open fifths to the clashing eighth note pulse that dominates the soundscape. As Jean-Francois argued, Gay Guerrilla, through its repetitive motifs over nearly 30 minutes, insists upon the reiteration of Eastman’s presence as a whole individual, or as he once said: “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.”Īrranged for strings, rather than the original four pianos-though Eastman did write the piece for any number of similar instruments- Gay Guerrilla felt more lush and less pointed but no less driven. Jean-Francois framed the need to remember Eastman’s story and music within the legacies of other Black artists of the ’80s, such as the poet Essex Hemphill. “To be what I am to the fullest”Įastman strikes a singular figure in the classical music scene as a radical Black gay composer who died young in 1990 and has undergone a resurgence of interest in the past decade. The concert, swelling with poetic and experimental energy, also showcased soprano Melissa Wimbish in Benjamin Britten’s Les Illuminations, along with Andrew Yee’s performance of a solo cello piece by Pulitzer winner Tania León. Isaac Jean-Francois, a Yale PhD student and Eastman scholar, led with a stirring presentation on Eastman’s legacy and the imperative to remember him and his music in all his complexity. Honoring queer ancestors during Pride Month, the dynamic chamber group and organization presented composer Jessie Montgomery’s new setting of Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla for string septet, featuring Montgomery on violin. Via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.The rhythmic pulsations of the avant-garde composer Julius Eastman cascaded through National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on the closing night of ChamberQUEER’s The Future Is… Festival (available to watch on Vimeo). Includes unlimited streaming of Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise "Unjust Malaise effectively rewrote the history of post-war American New Music, restoring to its narrative a gay black voice creating a liberating, high-energy form of organic minimalism." -The Guardian This set of discs is a bold beginning to restoring to history the works of one of the most important members of the first post-minimalist generation. His works show different routes minimalism might have taken, and perhaps some of those will now be followed up. These three pieces, all scored for multiple pianos, build up immense emotive power through the incessant repetition of rhythmic figures."Įastman was an energizing underground figure, one whose forms are clear, whose methods were powerful and persuasive, and whose thinking was supremely musical. The pieces he wrote in this style often had intentionally provocative titles intended to reinterpret the minorities Eastman belonged to in a positive light: for example, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla (all circa 1980). Applying minimalism's additive process to the building of sections, he developed a composing technique he called 'organic music,' a cumulatively overlapping process in which each section of a work contains, simultaneously, all the sections which preceded it. In his book American Music in the Twentieth Century, composer/author Kyle Gann briefly sums up Eastman's work and its importance: "Born in New York, he graduated from the Curtis Institute in composition and was discovered by Lukas Foss, who conducted his music, including Stay On It (1973), one of the first works to introduce pop tonal progressions and free improvisation in an art context. This comprehensive and definitive document, which comprises almost all of Eastman's signature works, will undoubtedly be a revelation for those who have thus far been unable to hear his work. This three-disc set marks the first appearance on disc of the music of the African-American composer Julius Eastman (1940-1990), who died under unexplained circumstances and whose musical legacy was thought lost.
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