8/6/2023 0 Comments Julius eastman![]() ![]() While I am not a gay black man, I am a musician and composer, and Eastman and I were colleagues, having first met in 1981 at a rehearsal of a piece by fellow composer Hugh Levick.Īfter trying to find one of Eastman’s pieces eight years after he died and learning that most of his music was lost, I began to search for scores and recordings-a search that resulted in the first commercial releases of his work. ![]() He was also a musician and composer of immense talent. What was missing in that premise is the reason why I find it so important to speak and write about Eastman: In a time when identity politics command so much attention-most of it well-deserved and long past its due-it’s also important to stress that he was more than a gay black man. What I hadn’t known was that there had been earlier discussions before the festival about whether it would be ethical for me, a white woman, to speak about a gay black man, and that the moderator of the post-lecture discussion-the leader of an activist group of queer people of color-agreed to take part in what I later learned would be characterized as a “facilitation that unpacks privilege in the conversation around Eastman’s work and Mary Jane’s life in relation thereof.” This is what I did at the OBEY festival in June.īut in a pre-planned group discussion following my talk, I soon realized that the subject wasn’t going to be Eastman and his music but instead an inquisition into me that would wind up marginalizing-again, as had happened to him so often in the past-the true subject at hand. I cite the problematic titles just once at the beginning, and then subsequently refer to them indirectly. Near the end of my talk I discuss the arc of Eastman’s titling tendencies-from early pieces with conventional titles ( Sonata and Birds Fly Away) and suggestive ones ( Touch Him When and Joy Boy) to the Nigger series and on to religious invocations ( The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc and Buddha). My solution for lectures in the past has been to play Eastman’s spoken explanation before I start, followed by a warning and an apology in advance for articulating words that are so offensive. I can almost hear him cackling away as he takes in peoples’ discomfort from beyond. I am fully aware of how controversial these titles are and keep trying to figure out what approach to take to address them: don’t repeat the exact titles and ignore the wish of the composer, or cite them as intended and risk offending some members of the audience? Here is Eastman the trickster at work, creating a problem for which there is no good solution. And so therefore we are playing two of these ‘Niggers.’ ” There might be, there are of course 99 names of Allah and there are 52 niggers. ![]() You see, and that’s what I mean by nigger, so there are many niggers, many kinds of niggers. So that a nigger for me is that kind of thing which attains himself or herself to the ground of anything. Now the reason that I use that particular word is because for me it has a, what is, what I call a basicness about it … and what I mean by ‘nigger’ is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that obtains to a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that thing which is superficial or, what we can say, elegant. “There is a whole series of these pieces,” he says in a recording of his remarks “They are called the ‘Nigger’ series. Instead, Eastman gave a spoken introduction explaining why he titled the pieces the way he did. At their premiere at Northwestern University in 1980, due to protests at the time, the titles weren’t printed in the program. The titles are obviously problematic and create all kinds of issues regarding how to refer to them. Gay Guerilla is the title of one of a group of three pieces from around 1980 that are usually played on four pianos, and two more of the kind from the late ’70s are Evil Nigger and Crazy Nigger. One of them figured in the title of a book I co-edited, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (University of Rochester Press, 2015). But rather than a fruitful discussion of Eastman’s probing, piercing minimalist music and legacy as an overlooked composer only now getting his due, the situation turned into a referendum on complicated questions: who gets to hold forth on artists of different identities, and on whose terms?Ī gay black composer who was a colleague of mine and a subject of great interest for me ever since his death in 1990, Eastman wrote some compositions with controversial titles. Recently I was asked to present a lecture on him and his work at the OBEY Convention, a music and sound festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Almost 30 years after his death, the great musician Julius Eastman is still a source of trickster hijinks-and a subject who taps into timely concerns. ![]()
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