BLACK TO THE FULLEST, A MUSICIAN TO THE FULLEST, A
HOMOSEXUAL TO THE FULLEST
ON THE INTERSECTIONALITY IN THE MUSIC AND LIFE OF JULIUS EASTMAN
Lara Heetveld 10161414
MA Arts & Culture: Musicology July 3rd, 2019, Amsterdam
Supervisor: dhr. dr. M. Beirens
‘You’ll get freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get
your freedom; then you’ll get it. It’s the only way you’ll get it. When you get that kind of attitude, they’ll label you as a “crazy Negro,” or they’ll call you a “crazy nigger” – they don’t say Negro. Or they’ll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your freedom.’ – Malcom X1
INDEX
INTRODUCTION 5 1. MINIMAL MUSIC 11 1.1 OVERVIEW 11 1.2 THE NON-WEST 22 1.3 BEYOND MINIMALISM 25 2. A BIOGRAPHY 28 2.1 EARLY YEARS 30 2.1.1 ITHACA 302.1.2 CURTIS INSTITUTE OF MUSIC 32
2.2 LATE YEARS 33
2.2.1 BUFFALO 33
2.2.2 DOWN TOWN NEW YORK 41
2.3 EASTMAN AS PERSONA 46
3. INTERSECTIONALITY 50
3.1 OVERVIEW 52
3.2 BACKGROUND 53
3.3 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 56
3.4 THE NIGGER SERIES 61
3.4.1 CRAZY NIGGER 63
3.4.2 GAY GUERRILLA 67
3.4.3 EVIL NIGGER 70
3.5 THE BLACK AND GAY GUERRILLA 73
CONCLUSION 79
INTRODUCTION
“What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a
musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”2
Julius Eastman
It is 1991, on the 28th of May when the African-American composer, performer and,
above all, artist Julius Dunbar Eastman Jr. dies all alone, without any family or friends. Nobody in the music world knew about his death, until the American musicologist Kyle Gann wrote his obituary eight months later for the Village Voice on January the 22nd:
Julius Eastman died May 28, 1990, alone, at Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo. He was forty-nine. According to the death certificate, he died of cardiac arrest. Depending on whom you talked to, it was brought on by insomnia and possible tuberculosis, dehydration, starvation, exhaustion, or depression (supposedly not AIDS). According to his brother, his body was cremated, and there was a family memorial service in Annapolis, Maryland.3
Life in and around New York City during the second part of the twentieth century was not easy on Julius Eastman. He lived in an era where the emergence of the gay liberation (e.g. the Stonewall Inn riots in Greenwich Village: the protests against the police harassment of gay people) and the black power movements of the 1960s marked his daily life.4 Having sexual acts between two people of the same sex was
illegal in many parts of the United States until the late twentieth century.5 However,
being a homosexual in the New York musical ‘Downtown scene6’ around the 1960s
2 Packer, Renée Levine (2015): 2. 3 Idem: 65.
4 Dohoney, Ryan (2015): 117. 5 Eskridge, William N. (2009): 161.
6 ‘Downtown refers to downtown Manhattan’, as Kyle Gann explains on his website kylegann.com/downtown. However, according to Gann, it is not just about Downtown Manhattan: there are Downtown composers all over America and even in Europe.
and 1970s was not something uncommon. In parts of the art world homosexuality was acknowledged and sometimes even celebrated. Eastman’s alliances with other gay composers – composers such as Arthur Russell and John Cage – show us that there was indeed a ‘network’ of gay artists in this scene. ‘Downtown New York in the late seventies was a gay party’, says US-American author Renée Levine Packer.7
However, in Eastman’s case, being (openly) gay and black too that was still rather exceptional, and was probably also regarded as such at that time. Black artists were far less represented in the Downtown New York music scene than queer artists. It was ‘like a double whammy’, as his brother Gerry Eastman remarks. ‘He had to have double ‘fuck you’ armor to survive.’8
Eastman was not reluctant at all to show the outside world who he was. ‘What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest’, says Eastman in an interview with the Buffalo Evening News.9 Both on stage and in his compositions the composer
focussed on two important themes of his life: race (‘blackness’) and (homo)sexuality. The artist wrote compositions with provocative titles as Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger and
Crazy Nigger. Audiences or fellow composers were sometimes offended by these
provocative themes in combination with Eastman’s often-theatrical performances as a bass baritone singer, pianist or even dancer. The composer was a jack-of-all-trades.
‘Downtown is a state of mind’, Gann continues, ‘but musicologically speaking it’s actually a rather well-defined performance practice’. In his essay The Great Divide (1996) Gann
illustrates: ‘Uptown/Downtown isn’t really the exact distinction. The difference lies between those whose only exposure to new music has come from within academia’s ivied walls, and everybody else’.
7 Packer, Renée Levine (2015): 50. 8 Idem: 3.
One such example would be the infamous ‘Song Books Incident’ when Eastman, while performing John Cage’s Song Books, invited a young man onto the stage and undressed him. Cage himself was present that evening and seemed to be filled with rage. Some weeks later Jeff Simon, a journalist of the Buffalo Evening
News, wrote a brief summary of the incident, which emphasizes, that Eastman’s aim
as an artist was ‘not to make himself heard’, as Adam Shatz remarks in his essay Bad
Boy from Buffalo, but ‘to make himself seen’.10
A New System of Love
Wednesday evening, at a public concert, the S.E.M. Ensemble performed [Cage’s] 1970-72 Song Books in which each performer is supposed to devise his own program of activity independently of the others. One male performer [Eastman] brought out a young, blond man and a young black woman and proceeded to spiel out a broadly funny lecture on ‘a new system of love’ with virulent homosexual overtones. At the end of it, the young man was undressed and the subject of the performer’s mocking advances.11
Eastman was a man of many worlds. In his constant search for identity as a black, gay musician, he (un)settled in the world of classical music, jazz (inspired by jazz
phenomena like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane), disco, academia and Downtown New York. It is hard, and perhaps even impossible, to define his music into one genre, but as Kyle Gann clearly points out in Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (2015), Eastman’s music is often placed in the ‘minimalist world of the late 1970s, whose epicenter was Downtown Manhattan’.12 Many of his compositions, especially
his confrontational Nigger Series, contain elements often ascribed to minimal music: the musical development of the 1960s with its tendency towards a simpler and more direct music. This musical development was a reaction to the technical complexities and emotional conflicts prominent in most forms of Western art music, where compositional techniques and the aesthetic ideas about music were being expanded 10 Shatz, Adam (2018): 2.
11 Packer, Renée Levine (2015): 45. 12 Gann, Kyle (2015): 97.
and elaborated and the primary focus, which defines this simplicity and directness, is on reduction and repetition. The four best-known musical minimalists are, according to Keith Potter, La Monte (Thornton) Young (b. 1935), Terry Riley (b. 1935), Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Philip Glass (b. 1937), who will be further introduced in the first chapter of this thesis.13
Eastman’s compositions move from traditionally notated ones, to rather open scores, and the artist was perhaps the first (post-)minimalist composer to
complement a minimalist piece, containing the ‘classic’ repetition and additive processes, with pop rhythms and harmonies, like in his composition Stay On It (1973). ‘Minimalism was still in its austere, two-dimensional phase, conceptual and concerned with abstract pattern’, writes Gann, ‘but in one step Eastman started mixing genres and forecasting techniques that would be tried in postminimalism fifteen years hence’. 14
Unfortunately, during his turbulent lifetime, a great part of Eastman’s compositions has been lost and, in my opinion, the artist still has not got the recognition he deserves, unlike for instance his fellow composers La Monte Young, Riley, Reich and Glass. Therefore, along with the important work of authors like Reneé Levin Packer, Mary Jane Leach and Kyle Gann, my aim is to contribute to what already has been written about the artist. Referring to what Shatz wrote in his essay on Eastman: how can his music be understood when the artist rather ‘wanted to be seen, than to be heard’?15 What kind of role do themes like gender, race and
sexuality play in his music? In order to provide an answer to these questions I will focus in this thesis on the intersectionality in the life and the music of Julius Eastman, and thereby specifically focusing on his Nigger Series (Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger and
Gay Guerrilla).
Intersectionality is a quite young concept, coined by US-American civil rights advocate Kimberlé Willems Crenshaw in 1989. Back then, the term was used as an analytic tool to examine the oppression of African-American women and today the term includes all forms of social division such as class, gender, religion, age, and 13 Potter, Keith (2000).
14 Gann, Kyle (2015): 98. 15 Shatz, Adam (2018): 2.
sexual preference. Intersectionality can be considered as an analytic tool or
framework, which can be used to solve problems concerning various forms of social stratification. Thereby, intersectionality acknowledges that ‘single focus lenses’ on social inequality (e.g. class, race, sexual preference) do not exist separately from each other, but that they are intertwined (see chapter three for a broader comment). In
Intersectionality (2016), US-American authors Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge
introduce six core ideas (social inequality, power, relationality, social context, complexity and social justice), which can be considered, according to them, as guideposts for ‘thinking through intersectionality’.16
Based on a literary study I will aim to give an extensive interpretation on the main question of this thesis: How can the intersectionality in the life and music of Julius Eastman be understood in the Downtown (post-)minimal music scene of the 1970s/1980s? The first chapter will give an overview on the concept minimal music (its history, ‘the four musical minimalists’ and various definitions of the term
proposed by authors such as Robert Fink, Wim Mertens and Keith Potter), I will examine related notions as postminimalism and totalism (as suggested by Kyle Gann) and minimal music in relation to the ‘non-West’ will be discussed. However, I would like to mention that I will not write a biography of the four most well-know
minimalists composers La Monte Young, Riley, Reich and Glass. For a detailed description of their lives, I would recommend reading ‘Four Musical Minimalists’ (2002), by Keith Potter.
Chapter two will be devoted completely to the artist himself, Julius Eastman. A short biography will be presented with a focus on the artist being a true activist, or ‘guerrilla’, in both his composing and his performance practice, his membership with the Creative Associates and the S.E.M. Ensemble and his position in the Downtown music scene of New York. Besides, an interpretation will be given on Eastman’s sexuality in relation to John Cage and a comparison of Eastman to the glam rock scene of the early 1970s will be discussed.
In chapter three I will discuss intersectionality and I will focus on the two main themes: race and (homo)sexuality. On the basis of the six core ideas presented by Collins and Bilge and a musical analysis of Eastman’s Nigger Series (Evil Nigger, 16 Collins, Patricia Hill and Sirma Bilge (2016): 15.
Crazy Nigger and Gay Guerrilla), I will use intersectionality as a critical theory to
analyse the music and the life of Julius Eastman.
Finally, in the conclusion I will give an answer to the main question of this thesis: How can the intersectionality in the life and music of Julius Eastman be understood in the Downtown (post-)minimal music scene of the 1970s/1980s?
1. MINIMAL MUSIC
The concept of minimalism has been regarded as a particularly US-American phenomenon that was used for the first time in the visual arts during the mid-twentieth century. Although minimalism has certainly developed outside the United States, US-American artists – in particular artists from New York – are being labelled as the embodiment of this movement, both in the arts (minimal art) as in music (minimal music).17 Whereas minimal art had become an established term already –
their movement was a reaction to the previous avant-garde where, in the arts, everything was possible: everybody could become an artist and anything could be seen as art (Anything goes) – in Western art music a movement was created among a group of young US-American composers during the 1960s.
The origins of minimal music lie in serialism, however, whereas serialism is atonal, minimal music, on the other hand, is tonal, or rather, diatonic.18 Aspects of
the music of serialist composer Anton Webern, for example, fascinated La Monte Young. Young recognized Webern’s ‘tendency to repeat pitches at the same octave positions throughout a section of a movement’.19 Although this movement could be
perceived as ‘constant variation’ on the surface, it could be perceived as ‘stasis’ too, because of its identical form or series, which is being repeated throughout the entire composition. Take for instance a composition existing of a x-number of various phrases, where the only constant note of each phrase is the last one: a central A. Although these phrases may completely differ from each other, this constant variation can be perceived as some sort of resting point, or stasis, because of this central A, which will keep appearing at the end of each phrase.
Among the group of young US-American minimalist composers are the four best-known minimalists La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, or, as Keith Potter tends to call them: ‘the four musical minimalists’.20 They preferred an
alternative to the traditional conventions of the Western classical music and started composing ‘new’ music, while focusing on reduction in every possible way. The
obvious answer to “Anything goes!” was “No it doesn’t”, says US-American
17 Strickland, Edward (1993).
18 A scale consisting of five whole tones and two semitones in each octave. 19 Nyman, Michael (1974): 139.
musicologist Donald Jay Grout. The new maxim was “Reduce”!21 This group of
composers was, among other things, striving for the elimination of musical meaning, musical expression or grandeur, technical musical complications and emotion (Gann defines this as ‘emotional staticness’, and explains that the music is not ‘unemotive’; it maintains just one affect throughout the entire composition22). The music had to go
back to some sort of fundamental base, which explains their primary focus on reduction. Even though not every minimalist work contains exactly the same
characteristics, there are a few style conventions often present in minimal music. For example, compositions often unfold slowly over extreme lengths of time and, unlike in traditional Western classical music, minimalist composers do not always work towards a musical climax.23 Instead, a minimalist composition is rather seen as a
process, or an ongoing performance: the composition is never finished and musical change develops gradually. This could remind one of the term ‘organic music’24,
which Julius Eastman, among other composers, also used to describe (some of) his compositions. Furthermore, the tempo of minimalist compositions is often constant, composers make use of additive rhythms25, the focus is rather on diatonic tonality
than on chromatic26 tonality and repetition of both rhythmic and melodic phrases is
very common. A good example of a minimalist composition can be found in Reich’s
Drumming (1971), a composition that turned out to be one of his longest continuous
works ever: it takes about 55-75 minutes (not very minimal), depending on the number of repeats. The music slowly unfolds over the length of the composition, maintaining a constant tempo and ends very abruptly (there is no climax). The composition consists of four parts: part one is played by four pair of tuned bongo drums (played with sticks), part two by three marimbas played by nine players together with two women’s voices, part three by three glockenspiels played by 4 players together with whistling and a piccolo and part four is played by a
combination of the aforementioned instruments and voices.27 During the process of
21 Taruskin, Richard (2005): 353. 22 Gann, Kyle (2013): 39.
23 Morgan, Robert P. (1991): 423.
24 The next phrase of a composition contains a part of the previous phrase. 25 The addition of extra notes or rests, resulting in irregular rhythms. 26 A scale that only consists of semitones.
composition Reich realised that he was singing along, while he was playing the drums. He used his voice creating syllables like ‘tuk’, ‘tok’, ‘duk’, and so on, to imitate the sounds of the bongo drums. In case of the marimbas, he concluded that female voices were needed for imitating their sounds, using consonants like ‘b’ and ‘d’ with a more or less ‘u’ (as in ‘you’) vowel sound. The extremely high range of the
glockenspiels excluded any use of the voice and for the same reason, whistling was necessary. Instead of using voices, Reich decided to add the high-pitched piccolo.28
Drumming is the final expansion and refinement of the process of phase shifting: a
composition technique, commonly used in minimal music, where rhythmic patterns (phases) shift through the beat. The idea of phase shifting is two musicians (or one musician + tape) playing two or more identical patterns, which they subsequently repeat. These patterns are played at a slightly different pace, so they gradually move apart (‘out of phase’). Often, these patterns come together eventually and arrive again at synchronisation.
Besides the prominent use of phase shifting, four new composition
techniques – at least new for Reich – originated during the creation of Drumming, which can be considered minimalist. The first one is the process of gradually
substituting beats for rests, or vice versa (see image 1). Here, the reduction process is the practice of reversal, where rests are substituted for beats, one at a time, until just one single beat remains.This technique is used for the first time in Drumming and later on, Reich used it as well in Six Pianos, Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and
Organ and Music for Pieces of Wood, all composed in 1973.29 The second technique is
the gradual changing of timbre (the four parts with different instruments and
therefore, different timbres), while rhythm and pitch remain constant. The third one is the simultaneous combination of instruments of different timbre (especially in the last part, where all instruments are playing together) and the fourth is the use of the human voice by imitating the exact sound of the instruments.
28 Idem. 29 Idem: 68.
Image 1: REICH, Drumming, mm. 93-10030
It is still not clear who came up with the term ‘minimal music’ first - as both US-American writer Tom Johnson (in 1972) and writer/composer Michael Nyman (in 1968) claim to be the first music critic to use the word ‘minimalist’ for musical purposes – and, interestingly, most composers described as minimalist are impatient with the term. Of course, labelling music implies limitation at the same time and no creative artist likes to be limited, as Potter already points out in his book Four
Musical Minimalists (2000). Furthermore, the word ‘minimal’ has this derogatory
sounding suggestion of ‘less than usual’.31 Words as ‘simple’ and ‘easy’ are often
being ascribed to minimal music, which might be a shortcoming for the music itself. Although there is a certain consensus on the key features of ‘minimal music’, various authors differ from each other in approaching the subject. The main focus of
30 Idem: 65.
Robert Fink, for example, is the relation of minimal music to the mass consumer society. In his book Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural
Practice (2005); Fink discusses his central argument, assuming that repetition is the
main characteristic of minimal music:
‘[…] the most recognizably “minimal” contemporary music is actually maximally
repetitive music, and that as a cultural practice, this excess of repetition is
inseparable from the colorful repetitive excess of postindustrial, mass-mediated consumer society’.32
Fink states that what one now recognizes as ‘consumer society’, is a result of post-World War II America, where the overproduction of consumer goods and their corresponding advertising practices became highly criticized. Fink:
‘[…] academics and journalists began laying the foundation for a countercultural critique of consumption as meaningless repetition. Minimalist art and music have usually been considered part of that counterculture’.33
Thus, according to Fink, minimal music is part of the counter culture, which was a reaction to the excess of meaningless consumption. During the 1960s, minimal artists – in the fine arts, for example, artists such as Richard Serra (image 2) and Donald Judd (image 3) – wanted to avoid political statements in their art. Their art needed to be aesthetically detached from the consumer’s world and everything related to that. Minimal artists wanted to be associated with labour and overt imagery of
production, instead of capital and consumption.34 Both images below are examples of
the artist’s preference for work over shopping, which led the American artist Robert Morris in 1961 to an exhibition of the art works. Essentially, this preference of the artists may be sincere, however, it can be questioned to what extent this
‘detachment of mass consumer society’ is still applicable when artworks like these are being sold to museums, art galleries, or other artists to subsequently be exhibited to the mass.
32 Fink, Robert (2005): x. 33 Idem.
Image 2: Snake by Richard Serra35
Image 3: 100 Shimmering Aluminum Boxes by Donald Judd36
35 See www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3 for more information.
36 See www.archdaily.com/777737/how-donald-judds-100-shimmering-aluminum-boxes-light-up-the-chinati-foundation for more information.
One year before Robert Morris’ exhibition, in 1960, La Monte Young composed
Arabic Numeral (any integer), to H.F. (or simply: X for Henry Flynt). In this score the
performer has to repeat a single loud cluster multiple times, at equal intervals of between one and two seconds. The remarkable title of the composition thus refers to the number of repetitions chosen by the performer.37 The ‘repeated, rhythmic
pounding of a hammer on a nail’ in this composition can be considered as repetitive minimalism and the composition resembles the ‘austere high modernist ideology of a previous generation of art-music composers’.38 During a happening in 1960, Young
was dragging a gong to the stage, while Terry Riley was scraping a water basket against the wall, over and over again. The audience responded with cursing and protest singing. Remembering the article of American serial composer Milton Babbit ‘ Who Cares if You Listen?’ (1958), in the aforementioned example, the artist (Young) can be seen as ‘a (production) specialist whose abstract sound-products demonstrate total disengagement with conventional and commercial culture’.39 In pursuing this
assumption, one could indeed ‘classify’ Young at the same artistic level as artists like Serra and Judd.
The Flemish Belgian composer Wim Mertens has a rather philosophical and ideological view on minimal music. According to him, ‘minimal music refers to the extreme reduction of the musical means the four American composers we are here concerned with’ – Young, Riley, Reich and Glass – ‘use in their works’.40 However, as
Mertens already points out: is reduction the only characteristic to which we assign minimal music?
‘Strictly speaking the term minimal can only be applied to the limited initial material and the limited transformational techniques the composers employ, and even this is only the case in the earlier works of Reich and Glass. Certainly, one can usually observe in this music a dominant equality of timbre and rhythm, a constant density and a very limited number of pitches. But in terms of length these compositions are certainly not minimal. […] Moreover, one can see an increase in the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of repetitive music as each of the composers themselves (apart from Young) has developed’.41
37 Potter, Keith (2000): 47. 38 Idem.
39 Fink, Robert (2005): xi. 40 Mertens, Wim (1980): 12. 41 Idem.
Indeed, both Terry Riley as Philip Glass have composed works of great length (Riley is known for his All-Night-Concerts and Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts lasts over four hours). Besides, whereas Reich used just six pitches in total in Piano Phase (1967), namely E-F#-A-B-C#-D (see image 4), it increases tot nine in Music for Mallet
Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973): Eb-F-G-Gb-Ab-Bb-C-D-Db (Reich switches from
F Dorian in the first section, to its “parallel” As Dorian in the second42). Finally, in
terms of instrumentation, the four composed works for single instruments (minimal instrumentation): Young’s Death Chant (voice), Riley’s The Well Tuned Piano (piano), Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain (tape) and Glass’s Strung Out (amplified violin). However, they all composed works of orchestral or concert size too (maximal instrumentation): The
Tortoise (Young), In C (Riley), Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (Reich) and
the opera Akhnaten (Glass).43 Thus, reduction can indeed be considered as an
important characteristic of minimal music, however, as illustrated, it is not a requirement.
Image 4: REICH, Piano Phase: (a) Basic Unit of Part One; (b) Basic Unit of Part Two; (c) Basic Unit of Part Three.44
42 Potter, Keith (2000): 230. 43 Idem.
Besides the importance of reduction, as described in the beginning of this chapter, repetition too can be seen as a main characteristic of minimal music. Though, it is not a new phenomenon at all and therefore it is not just characteristic for minimal music; it is, for example, also a basic characteristic of European polyphonic music.45 The only
‘new’ aspect in the use of repetition is, according to Mertens, the global musical context in which it is used, and this is the only situation that can make a distinction between ‘American repetition’ – which in itself can be considered as an inappropriate description, as this implies that minimal music is of US-American nature – and
repetition in classical music.46 Mertens explains:
In traditional music, repetition is used in a pre-eminently narrative and
teleological frame, so that musical components like rhythm, melody, harmony
and so on are used in a causal, pre-figured way, so that a musical perspective emerges that gives the listener a non-ambivalent orientation and that attempts to inform him of meaningful musical contents.47
As previously illustrated, it could be argued that minimal composers, as opposed to composers of traditional Western classical music, do not work towards a musical climax. ‘The traditional work is teleological or end-orientated, says Mertens,
‘because all musical events result in a directed end or synthesis’. The traditional work is a ‘musical product’ characterized by an ‘organic totality’, while minimal music, on the other hand, is an ongoing performance: there is no end. Additionally, minimal composers were striving for less (musical) meaning, so there is no or less space for narratives or teleology.
In Feminine Endings (1991), Susan McClary discusses tonality, and therefore working towards a climax, as being male-orientated. According to her, the main innovation of seventeenth century tonality is ‘its ability to instil in the listener an intense longing for a given event: the cadence’.48 The result of this longing is the
45 Mertens, Wim (1980): 13. 46 Idem: 16.
47 Idem: 16-17.
‘climax’, which can be experienced as metaphorical ejaculation, because in the seventeenth century, images of desire were often represented by ‘male characters’ who could thereby ‘demonstrate their rationality, their rhetorical powers and their ability to set and achieve long-term goals’.49 The use of repetition, and thus the
avoidance of a musical climax, can therefore be understood as an alternative view on minimal music not being male-orientated and asexual too. However, it should be questioned whether minimal music is indeed not end-orientated, or that some minimalist compositions do work towards a musical climax.
Central to Potter’s view on minimal music, is the role of harmonic motion, which is of great importance in the music these composers were writing in the 1970s, and the various notions of hierarchy that are present in their earliest minimalist compositions.50 Thus, whereas Mertens and others argue that minimal
music is purposeless or anti-teleological, Potter believes that the music does have a purpose: harmonic motion. Potter continues:
The early outputs of Young, Riley, Reich and Glass may thus be interpreted as foregrounding the modal materials and repetitive formal schemes set aside by the fragmented discourses of serialism and indeterminacy, and also challenging the capacity of such materials and structures to come up with something quite different from the reassuring continuities of a neoclassicism which, surviving until beyond the 1950s, had long ago lost its cutting edge.51
Minimal music can indeed be seen as teleological, when one believes
minimalism to be an art movement as a reaction to the previous avant-garde or, as Fink states, a counter culture against the excess of meaningless
consumption.
What can be perceived as problematic is the rather US-American perception all these authors have on minimal music. Although, many great minimal composers, such as the four musical minimalists, are US-American, there are certainly many great non US-American composers who can be considered minimalist too, such as Michael Nyman (UK), Louis Andriessen (Netherlands) and Karel Goeyvaerts 49 Idem: 126.
50 Potter, Keith (2000): 17. 51 Idem.
(Belgium), who are considerably less represented in literature concerning minimal music. Besides, both Potter as Mertens mainly focus on ‘just’ the four musical minimalists. Mertens even states: ‘These four American composers were the first to apply consistently the techniques of repetition and minimalism in their works’.52 Of
course, ‘these four’ are the best-known musical minimalists; so naturally, more work has been published about them. However, it can be questioned whether those four composers were indeed the first composers to apply the minimalist techniques in their music, looking at other early minimalist compositions such as Elegy (1957) by Louis Andriessen. In terms of coherence, it would be appropriate for authors to focus more on other composers, who were in some sense part of the same movement as ‘the great four’, both within the continent (United States), and beyond.
1.2 THE NON-WEST
The tendency towards a simpler and more direct music is mainly a result of a great interest in non-Western music and philosophy among composers from the Western art music53 of the 1950s. By that time, both European and US-American composers –
labelled as ‘discoverer-composers’ by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh in
Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music
– started traveling the world in search for ‘unknown’ musical traditions that possibly could enhance the quality of their own Western musical life.54 As Morgan clearly
illustrates: like much Oriental art, this simpler and more direct music is ‘shorn of the technical complexities and emotional conflicts prominent in most forms of Western music’.55
The four musical minimalists all have great affinity with the non-West, whether it is due to distant travels, or to intensive research they did in their homeland. La Monte Young, for example, is strongly influenced by Indian classical music, Indonesian gamelan and traditional Japanese Gagaku music, which has resulted in the frequent use of drones in works like The Second Dream of the High – 52 Mertens, Wim (1980): 11.
53 Classical and contemporary composed music performed within concert halls affiliated with universities, colleges, and metropolitan centers of European, US-American, and more recently, East Asian countries.
54 Everett, Yayoi Uno. Lau, Frederick (2004): 1. 55 Morgan, Robert P. (1991): 423.
Tension Line Stepdown Transformer (1960). Terry Riley made multiple travels trough
India and studied Indian vocal music, tanpura and tabla with his teacher Pandit Pran Nath, who also taught Young. Riley’s critically acclaimed compositions A Rainbow in
Curved Air (1967) and Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band (1969) both contain
elements from Indian ragas. Steve Reich travelled to Ghana and processed his acquired musical inspiration in compositions like Drumming (1970-1971), which contains West-African elements, and in Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and
Organ (1973); one can find elements of Balinese gamelan. Finally, Philip Glass is
mainly inspired by Indian music, which had a great impact on Glass’ perception of additive rhythm.56
Is minimal music indeed that ‘simple’ as often is being stated, or is this perhaps a misconception and a big offense to minimal composers and even to an entire musical culture (e.g. in Ghana, Indonesia, Japan), because of the ‘non-Western’ musical influences that minimal music often includes? In Four Musical
Minimalists (2000), Potter mentions that Steve Reich, as a student, gets particularly
interested in ‘African music, with its complex counterpoint’, though Potter does not specify what ‘African music’ he is talking about, actually.57 Reich has indeed been
fascinated by pulse-dominated percussion-based music since he was a child: Reich takes up drumming lessons at the age of fourteen. Yet, how Potter describes Reich’s appreciation for Africa and its ‘musics’ is objectionable. There is no such thing as African music, just like there is no such thing as European or Asian music. African music can possibly be used as an umbrella term, in a way that various musics from various African countries can be a part of what one could call African music
(although, one has to be careful and precise in doing so and consider the influences from other cultures), however, one can not simply claim that there is such a thing as African music. Africa is a continent consisting of many countries with various musical traditions, which cannot and may not be generalized. Besides, in defining this ‘African music’ as music with ‘its complex counterpoint’, Potter is also making sweeping assumptions. African music, says Potter, also contributes to Reich’s view on what he (Potter) calls ‘simplicity’ and he gives as an example Reich’s composition Clapping 56 Morgan, Robert P. (1991): 423-433.
Music.58 In his book Representing African Music (2003), Kofi Agawu talks about
Western and African scholars who both contribute to the fact that African rhythm and African music in general have been promulgated, which has resulted in the problem of unanimism: generalising African musics.59
Potter does not ‘only’ generalize, he also labels this all-purpose term of African music to the inferior characteristic of simplicity. Probably, in his example of
Clapping Music, Potter refers to the fact that Reich ‘just’ chose for human hands to
perform this composition and calls this ‘simple’. However, Potter’s choice to link simplicity (perhaps indirectly) to ‘African music’ results in a subordinate view towards the various musical traditions that Africa embodies. Besides, this adjective ‘simple’ does not only tells us something about Potter’s ideas about ‘African music’, but also about his – and perhaps our – view on the ‘Western classical musical tradition’. It is perhaps about the idea that this music (in contrast to ‘non-Western’ music) is both harmonically and structurally complex: e.g. elements like counterpoint, musical phrasing (shaping musical sequences of notes, altering in tempo, articulation, dynamics and so on), musical form (sonata, symphony etc.) and that it is complex in the use of orchestration (the possible use of various brass, percussion, string and woodwind instruments). The way Potter portrays Reich results in a somewhat remarkable view on ‘blackness’, interpreted through the eyes of a Jewish US-American (Reich).
58 Idem: 206.
1.3 BEYOND MINIMALISM
In order to provide a clear overview of minimal music, it is not only important to determine what music precedes it, but also what music follows. Kyle Gann is one of the scholars who, during the 1980s, identified ‘a new repertoire of music whose stylistic commonalities were too striking to ignore’.60 The (American) music he heard
was extremely diatonic, the beats were steady, the overall tempo of the music did not chance during the entire work, the dynamics were constant and the music was little expressive. These descriptions can be found in the definition of minimal music, however, what distinguishes this ‘new’ music from minimal is that this repertoire could vary from highly structured to entirely intuitive and everything in between. In his article A Technically Definable Stream of Postminimalism, Its Characteristics and
Its Meaning (2013), Kyle Gann introduces the reader to what, according to him, is ‘a
collective response to the somewhat earlier style known as minimalism’.61 Whereas
minimalism had been a response to the previous avant-garde, this music, later (somewhat vaguely) defined in the article as ‘postminimalism,’ was the answer to minimal music itself.
Although he has devoted much time to the research of ‘postminimalism’, Gann is not the researcher who invented the term. Several US-American critics, like John Rockwell, started using the term ‘post-Minimalism’ to describe the music of 60 Gann, Kyle (2013): 39.
composers like John Adams. Of course, by using the term postminimalism in music, these authors all implicitly referred to the art term post-minimalism coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971.62 However, Gann did apply the term more accurately than
others to define this music, which evolved during the 1980s and 1990s. Firstly, and of great importance, Gann explains that there is a difference between the term used by those who spell it with a hyphen (post-minimalism) and sometimes even with a capital first ‘M’, or those who use the term written as postminimalism, without a hyphen and without capital letters. Whereas the first term, including the hyphen, is mainly used to denote the music that comes ‘after’ minimalism, the latter term is applied by those who refer to a new style of music by younger composers and is also the typesetting and definition Gann uses in his research.63 If we apprehend Gann’s
ideas, postminimalism can be best recognized in (diatonic) compositions that contain techniques often associated with minimalism like phase-shifting64 and additive65 or
subtractive66 processes. In contrast to minimalism, postminimalist works ‘offer a wide
variety of expression’. Besides, whereas minimalism introduced the audience to new composing techniques like phase shifting, postminimalism did not gain such
requirements; the audience already had been introduced to such techniques, hence it did not feel like something genuinely ‘new’. Finally, Gann argues: postminimalism is
the opposite of serialism.67 Many postminimalists born in the 1940s and 1950s did
study serialism (just like the minimalists); they were searching for a more ‘audience-friendly music’, though, and got inspired by minimalism.68 Where serialist syntax is
abrupt, discontinuous, angular, arrhythmic and opaque, illustrates Gann,
62 Stiles, Kristine. Selz, Peter (2012): 687. 63 Gann, Kyle (2013): 41.
64 Phase shifting is a composition technique, commonly used in minimal music, where rhythmic patterns (phases) shift through the beat. The idea of phase shifting is two musicians (or one musician + tape) playing two or more identical patterns, which they subsequently repeat. These patterns are played at a slightly different pace, so they gradually move apart (‘out of phase’). Often, these patterns come together eventually and arrive again at synchronisation.
65 The addition of notes or rests, which will form a motive.
66 The subtraction of notes or rests (the opposite of an additive process). 67 Gann, Kyle (2013): 58.
postminimalist syntax is often the opposite: smooth, linear, melodic, gently rhythmic and comprehensible.69
A postminimalist composition resembles autonomy, since the references to other genres (e.g. Balinese gamelan, folk, pop, jazz, eighteenth-century chamber music, Renaissance music, and national anthems) are ‘cut off from their source, preserved in abstract notes, but not in emotional content, like a fly preserved in amber’.70 Further, what determines the difference between minimal and postminimal
music is the mysticism, which is present in the latter one and not in the first. Minimal music seems to be transparent, whereas postminimal music often ‘hides its logic just beneath the surface’.71
Finally, Gann adds that postminimalism should not be mistaken for another musical style called ‘totalism’, which is also derived from minimalism. Totalism is a rather rhythmically complex style and its harmonies are generally more dissonant.72
Of course, it can be hard and even impossible to define a composition into one genre and therefore it is not unusual that those genres blend into one another.
Postminimalism is, according to Gann, distinguished by the feeling of a unified rhythmic grid in a consistent tempo, whereas totalism is characterized by a feeling of different tempos superimposed in layers.73
69 Idem. 70 Idem. 71 Idem. 72 Idem: 57. 73 Idem.
2. A BIOGRAPHY
Not much has been written about Julius Eastman, partly because he remained relatively unknown, but also because much work has been lost due to his turbulent lifestyle. Eastman did not care much about his own health; he was often sick and did not keep a healthy lifestyle. Besides, he had little concern for his musical legacy too and therefore, many recordings and scores disappeared.74 In addition to some
reviews that have been written about Eastman’s music and performances, just a few authors – including Kyle Gann (Julius Eastman and the Conception of ‘Organic Music’) , Tom Johnson (‘The Voice of New Music’), Adam Shatz (Bad Boy from Buffalo) and Alex Ross (Guerrilla Minimalism) – wrote some rather in-depth essays about the artist in question. After she was asked to teach a course at Cal Arts for ‘real’ instruments in 1998, US-American composer Mary Jane Leach (b. 1949) began her research to all work that had been missing from Eastman. Leach knew him from a theatre piece they were both performing in around 1981. When she got asked to teach a course, she decided to include Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (1981), however, the scores were untraceable, so she started a seven-year search for the music of Eastman, who had died eight years earlier, and began collecting all her
findings (compositions, recordings, press) on her website.75 In 2005, Leach
contributed to the first commercial release of Eastman’s work: the three-disc set
Unjust Malaise (anagram for Julius Eastman), which contains almost all of his
‘signature works’.76
Along with Renée Levine Parker, who knew Eastman from the Creative Associates, a music collective at the State University of Buffalo, Leach published a volume of essays about the life and music of Eastman in 2015: Gay Guerrilla: Julius
Eastman and His Music. This study, written by various authors – David Borden, R.
Nemo Hill, Kyle Gann, John Patrick Thomas, Ryan Dohoney, Andrew
Hanson-Dvoracek, Matthew Mendez, Luciano Chessa and, of course, the two aforementioned editors – along with the remaining in-depth essays by Gann, Johnson, Shatz and Ross, can be considered as my main sources about the concerned artist Julius Eastman.
Gay Guerrilla offers context on Eastman’s life history, (subjective) observations on his
life, personality and talent, and analyses of his compositions. The book is a collection of essays, written by various authors, who were all on some level befriended with, or connected to the artist. I am aware of the little diversity of the literature concerning the main subject of my master thesis: Julius Eastman. However, since not much has been written about the composer, the aforementioned authors will be the main sources of this research.
One can geographically divide Eastman’s life into four parts. The first part is Ithaca, New York where Eastman grew up. The second part of his life can be located at the Curtis Institute of Music, where Eastman did his musical training. A great part of his professional years – being both a composer and a performer – Eastman spent in Buffalo and his final years are primarily devoted to the life in New York City.
75 See www.mjleach.com/eastman for more info. 76 See www.newworldrecords.org for more info.
2.1 EARLY YEARS
2.1.1 ITHACA
Julius Dunbar Eastman Jr. was born in a family from West Indian descent on October 27, 1940, at the Harlem Hospital in Manhattan. Five years later, on May 11, 1945, his brother Gerald Eastman was born and a few years later the family moved to a larger house in Ithaca, New York, where they grew up in a largely black neighbourhood (Ithaca itself did not have a large black population at that time, though77). Shortly
thereafter, Mr. and Mrs. Eastman got separated.78
When he was just a little boy, Eastman had already ‘a mind of his own’. He never liked to make any concessions. ‘If I told him to behave and sit down’, recalls Mrs Eastman, ‘he would stand rigidly erect (like a board) with fists clenched and you would have to kill him and break his bones to make him sit down. He never
changed’.79 The Eastman family had a grand piano at home (Eastman’s mother had
studied piano for many years) and at the age of ten, without having had any musical training, Eastman started playing Beethoven’s Für Elise, from the book that Mrs Eastman had bought for her son.80 In grade school, Eastman became a soprano singer
in the boys’ choir of St. John’s Episcopal Church and by the time he was going to 77 Packer, Renée Levine (2015): 13.
78 Idem: 11. 79 Idem: 12. 80 Idem.
Boynton Junior High School, he impressed many people (both class mates and teachers) with his deep bass-baritone voice. He started studying piano with the organist at the Episcopal Church and joined the Ithaca High School Glee Club, where he sang regularly.
Around the age of seventeen, Eastman started accompanying dance classes by playing the piano at the Iris Barbura Studio and later on, the boy begun taking ballet classes too and even wrote his own composition titled Vergiu’s Dance. The year before he graduated from high school, Eastman started studying piano with George Driscoll, a professor who recognized and supported the talent of the young boy. He encouraged Eastman to audition for the music conservatory the Juilliard School, however, Eastman got rejected. Driscoll suggested Eastman to apply for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and this time, Eastman succeeded.81
2.1.2 CURTIS INSTITUTE OF MUSIC
Around the age of nineteen, Eastman attended Curtis for his piano major. In addition to the piano classes, in his first year Eastman studied solfège, music dictation and Elements of Music too. In his second year Eastman switched his major from piano to composition; studying Counterpoint, Harmony I and Aural Harmony I, and
choreography. He was the only one of just two black students in a class of hundred. His classmates had had, unlike Eastman, many years of high quality musical training before entering Curtis, and according to his classmate and friend, Garcia Renart, it is plausible that because of this the other students may not have taken him as seriously as they should have. On the other hand, his other friend Zeyda Ruga recalls: ‘Julius was intelligent, handsome and graceful. He had a beautiful voice and was a graceful dancer. And he had a spiritual side. He could see through people. Music wasn’t a business for him. He wasn’t interested in making connection or making money. Things had to mean something spiritually to him’.82
In his first and second year at Curtis, Eastman never got better grades than a B and he often missed classes (he ‘forgot’, or ‘just didn’t go’). His health was not too good either: he was underweight and needed glasses. During his third year, his health continued to decline as he suffered from exhaustion. On February the 27th,
1963, Eastman graduated from Curtis.83 His aim by studying at Curtis was to ‘obtain
82 Idem: 15. 83 Idem: 18.
wisdom’, but actually he hated the school. ‘If I had to live there another year I shall die a morbid death’, he said.84
2.2 LATE YEARS
2.2.1 BUFFALO
What happened in the years following Eastman’s graduation is a bit vague, however, Mrs. Eastman recalled the remarkable situation when Eastman declined the offer of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, after he go accepted for a position.85 After a
five-year-return to Ithaca, Eastman left for Buffalo, toured with the Gregg Smith Singers in Europe and the United States, travelled a lot as a vocal soloist and made his entrance in the music and dance world of Buffalo. 1968 was surely a breakthrough year for Eastman.
Buffalo in the 1960s and 1970s was a hotbed of the musical avant-garde with musical figures like Lukas Foss, Morton Feldman, Petr Kotik, Frederic Rzewski, Terry Riley and Charles Gayle, who all have had significant influence on Eastman’s work.86 A
‘constant search for something new’ was crucial for many (avant-garde) artists during the 1960s and 1970s and this was, according to art critic Harold Rosenberg, a result of feelings of alienation and discontent experienced by artists during the post-war years.87 Many of the avant-garde artists worked together, which often resulted in
‘groupings’ or collectives such as The Creative Associates: a music collective for young composers and virtuoso instrumentalists who lived, studied, created and 84 Shatz, Adam (2018): 3.
85 Packer, Renée Levine (2015): 19. 86 Idem: 35.
performed (difficult and often controversial works) together (see image 5). Eastman attended the Creative Associates officially on September 1, 1969, as
pianist-composer, after the director, composer and conductor Lukas Foss invited him. The Creative Associates (official name: Center of the Creative and Performing Arts) were accommodated in the Music Department of the University of Buffalo, where Eastman got a job as music instructor too. The members of the Creative Associates – among which Morton Feldman, Petr Kotik, and Renée Levine Packer – came from all over the world. They created together, performed each other’s works, and compositions of composers outside the Creative Associates. For instance, Eastman performed Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together (1972), a composition for reciter and eight players; Eastman was the reciter. The text of the composition is a letter written by Sam Melville, a convict of the Attica prison, who died there during the 1971 prison riot. The uprising is one of the most well known uprisings of the Prisoner’s Rights Movement, where was fought for better living conditions and political rights. More than twelve hundred mainly black and Hispanic convicts took control of the prison, forced forty-three white guards as hostages, which resulted in the deaths of twenty-nine convicts and ten hostages.88
Image 5: Creative Associates at Dartmouth College. From left to right: Morton Feldman, Dennis Kahle, Amrom Chodos, Renée Levine Packer, Peter Gena, Eberhard Blum, Julius Eastman, David Gibson, Jan Williams, David Sussman, Benjamin Hudson, and Ralph Jones,
January 1974. Photograph by Stuart Bratesman Jr.
In 1970, Eastman continued for four years as a member of the S.E.M. Ensemble, another collective existing of former Creative Associates, like Kotik, who were not happy with the programming of Foss. By that time, Eastman realized that his life with the Creative Associates had been an enormous bubble and he got very unsatisfied with what he called ‘this artificial world’. He felt a growing ‘disenchantment’ against them and believed that they were ‘loosing their spark’.89
The S.E.M. Ensemble focussed on collaboration, improvisation, and the use of chance systems, which very much appealed to Eastman. During his years at the S.E.M. Ensemble, Eastman composed his ‘early’ works, each of them varying in genre. Thruway (1969-1970), for instance, contains segments of improvised sections and is scored for soprano, chorus, jazz combo, instrumental ensemble, film
projections, and tape. It is generally known a ‘jazz-tinged’ composition, however, unfortunately, there is no existing audio or video footage.90 The score of Macle
(1971), influenced by John Cage, is rather experimental and consists of twelve or 89 Idem: 42.
sixteen squares, whereas each square indicates an action for the vocalists to
complete, for example: ‘[make] sharp stabbing sounds’, or ‘[sing] your favourite pop tune’. There are no instruments allowed; only vocal sounds, and screams are often alternated with electronic buzzes and recurring chants of the words ‘Take heart’ (see image 6).91
Image 6: EASTMAN, Macle: page two and three of the score92
Stay on It (1973), which is part of the larger work called the Nigger Series, is
according to Gann ‘one of the first minimalist-based pieces to show pop music influences, and an early use of improvisation in a notated context.’93 The composition
begins with a syncopated riff, which is being repeated over and over again. The
catchy harmony and tonal progressions could remind one of pop music. Eastman
provided the performers of Stay on It with scores, however it was more identical to a jazz lead sheet, than to ‘official’ scores of avant-garde music. For instance, Eastman directed the interpretations of the composition verbally, or by example (Stay On It was primarily concerned ‘without using notes to use the musicians innate abilities’).94
Certainly, this complicates the process of performance, as the composer himself has passed away, and some of his associates (to whom Eastman directed his musical 91 Woolfe, Zachary (2016).
92 See http://www.musicsalesclassical.com/composer/work/5055/57991 for more information
93 Packer, Renée Levine (2015): 37. 94 Idem: 152.
intentions), have too. Femenine (1974) is a predominantly instrumental composition for four wind instruments, marimba, piano, electric bass and sleigh bells. The
marimba plays the main figure of three long E flats, followed by four short E flats. The figure alternates between E flats and F’s and should be repeated through the entire composition (about an hour), allowing it to be considered as a minimalist piece.95
As Packer already describes in her book Gay Guerrilla, it seems that Eastman was gradually dealing with a ‘growing discomfort’ regarding his professional musical life.96 After he left the Creative Associates with feelings of dissatisfaction towards the
music collective, it appears that he did no feel comfortable at the S.E.M. Ensemble too. Someday in December 1974, the ensemble was rehearsing for a European tour when Eastman all of a sudden jumped up, said: “I can’t stand this music anymore,’ walked out and left the S.E.M. Along with his two abrupt departures, both of the Creative Associates –– and the S.E.M., he was never stimulated nor happy with his students he used to teach at the University of Buffalo.97 Moreover, his constant
struggle between the worlds of classical music and jazz seems to have conflicted him the most. It seems that during his life, Eastman was in a constant search for his identity, both musically, as personally. In an interview with the Buffalo Evening News Eastman declares: ‘What I’m trying to achieve, is to be what I am to the fullest – Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest... It is through art that I can search for the self and keep in touch with my resource and the real me.’98 During this period, Eastman was turning away from the ‘classical
avant-garde’ and told the interviewer of the Buffalo Evening News that his excessive commitment with the jazz scene was a true revelation to him:
‘What happens now, instead of getting up every morning composing, I get up and practice the piano, improvise – it’s jazz, that’s the difference… Jazz is so exciting because it allows for instant expression of feelings; it has immediacy and it also has style… I feel it comes closer than classical music to being pure, instantaneous thought. When I am playing this music [jazz], I feel as if I am trying to see myself – it’s like diving into the earth, that’s what it feels like’.99
95 Idem: 44. 96 Idem: 42. 97 Idem.
98 Packer, Renée Levine (2015): 47. 99 Idem: 3.
According to his friends Donald Burkhardt and Karl Singletary, Eastman was
‘gregarious, flirtatious, and surrounded himself with a lot of friends’.100 However, on
the other hand, Burkhardt also remarks that Eastman could be very bold with his language and that he could really upset people. Burkhardt clarifies:
‘My parents came to visit when Julius and I were living together and we all went to see Niagara Falls. Julius kept using bad four-letter words and I had to tell him “Julius, we don’t talk like that in our family”. My mother was siting right there. Later, she thanked me. And at Christmas 1970, Julius and I took a Christmas tree with all the decorations to Syracuse to my grandparents’ house because they were too old to be able to manage it. We opened our gifts there. The gift he gave me was two very pornographic magazines wrapped up in tissue paper that you could see through. Now, we were all there together in the same room, and I could see as I was getting ready to open it, what was coming so I said, “Julius, do you think I should open this here?” And he said, “Oh yeah, go ahead.” But I didn’t open it because I knew what it was. My grandparents would have been shocked’.101
Eastman surely liked to shock people and not just his friends; he liked to shock his audiences too. During the winter of 1974-75, US-American composer Morton Feldman decided to create a new music festival, consisting of mainly one-man shows and lectures of the composers on their work, called ‘June in Buffalo’. The first three weeks of the festival concentrated on Feldman’s colleagues: John Cage, Earle Brown, and Christian Wolff, and the opening was dedicated to the music of Cage. Feldman asked the S.E.M. ensemble to perform Cage’s Song Books, and although Eastman had already left the ensemble, he agreed immediately on performing (voice) with them.102 ‘To prepare for a
performance,’ Cage instructed, ‘the actor will make a numbered list of verbs (actions) and/or nouns (things) not to exceed sixty-four with which he or she is willing to be involved and which are theatrically feasible (those may include stage properties, clothes, etc.; actions may be ‘real’ or mimed, etc.).’ The following review of Jeff Simon of the Buffalo Evening News provides a brief summary of how Eastman observed Cage’s instructions.
100 Idem: 23. 101 Idem: 26. 102 Idem: 44.
A New System of Love
Wednesday evening, at a public concert, the S.E.M. Ensemble performed [Cage’s] 1970-72 Song Books in which each performer is supposed to devise his own program of activity independently of the others. One male performer brought out a young, blond man and a young black woman and proceeded to spiel out a broadly funny lecture on “a new system of love” with virulent homosexual overtones. At the end of it, the young man was undressed and the subject of the performer’s mocking advances.103
Cage, who was part of the audience, seemed to be furious and heavily frustrated that his work could have been ‘so misunderstood’. ‘The freedom in my music does not mean the freedom to be irresponsible’, Cage raged the next morning.104 The question
arises then, why did Eastman change his approach so radically, while he had
performed the Song Books several times before? Why did he decide to sexualize the work of Cage? According to Ryan Dohoney, it is unlikely that Cage was the target of this performance, because ‘such camping and queer signifying were crucial elements of Eastman’s own practice (as in Creation and Tripod).105 Therefore, this ‘incident’ can
be considered as an illustration of the idea mentioned before, that Eastman ‘rather wanted to be seen, than to be heard’. He used the stage and his music to shock people, to provoke, but above all, to show the audience who he was. However, did Eastman really think this through, or are there perhaps no underlying intentions? After all, after Cage confronted him, Eastman told the composer that through
performing the work too many times, he had become bored with it. ‘If you are bored with it, why do you do it?’ said Cage. Eastman told him that he thought he would not do it in the future, to which Cage replied: ‘I’d be very grateful to you if you
wouldn’t’.106
A remarkable difference between Cage and Eastman, both being homosexual, is how they deal with their sexuality: Eastman was an ‘outspoken homosexual’ (Gann refers to him as a ‘gay activist’), while Cage did not share his sexual preference within the Downtown scene, or elsewhere. According to Dohoney, experimentalism was to
103 Idem: 45.
104 Gann, Kyle (2015): 96. 105 Dohoney, Ryan (2014): 46. 106 Idem: 47.
Eastman not just a musical, but also a sexual expression, and it often appeared as ‘critical camp’.107 If one acknowledges the definition of ‘camp’ from US-American
theorist David M. Halperin, than could Eastman’s ‘gay activist’ acts be understood as a resistance against authority. Halperin explains:
‘Camp, after all, is a form of cultural resistance that is entirely predicated on a shared consciousness of being inescapably situated within a powerful system of social and sexual meanings. Camp resists the power of that system from within by means of parody, exaggeration, amplification, theatricalization, and
literalization of normally tacit codes of conduct – codes whose very authority derives from their privilege of never having to be explicitly articulated, and thus from their customary immunity to critique’.108
Therefore, the ‘Song Books Incident’ can be interpreted as the resistance of the performer (Eastman) against systems of domination of the composer (Cage).
With his activist performances, Eastman resisted the social structures of his life in the New York Downtown scene. However, being a ‘gay activist’ in Buffalo during the 1970s was not very common and was especially not an easy ‘job’ to fulfil, Kotik clarifies:
‘[…] The Buffalo elite, so to speak, Mr. [Seymour] Knox [patron of the Albright-Knox Gallery] and his friends who supported us [the Creative Associates and the S.E.M. Ensemble] were the most conservative group of people you could imagine. I suspect that they are still that conservative. … These people funded all that was going on in the arts in Buffalo. They were very nice people, but they had their own ideas. Now can you imagine someone functioning as an “open homosexual” in this environment? It’s absurd.’109
107 Dohoney, Ryan (2014): 46. 108 Idem.
2.2.2 DOWNTOWN NEW YORK
During his eight years in Buffalo (1968-1976), Eastman wrote – besides many improvisations with the S.E.M. Ensemble, works with various jazz groups and his dance/theatre collaborations – at least fifteen compositions: e.g. Macle (1971), Stay
On It (1973), Femenine (1974) and Masculine (1974). After leaving the Creative
Associates and the S.E.M. Ensemble in 1975, Eastman moved to New York.110 As a
result of the musical network he had established in Buffalo, the composer was able to continue his abilities in New York. With the help of the musical director (Lukas Foss), he got a part-time job as a co-curator/conductor at the Brooklyn Philharmonica and Foss provided him an occasional platform as soloist and composer too. By that time, musicians and friends from Buffalo had formed a collective who lived the ‘experimental sensibility of the Creative Associates in the urban landscape of downtown’.111 Within this circle, Eastman was known for his great vocal
performances. This status as a vocalist and his reputation as a performer resulted in collaborations with acclaimed artists such as Meredith Monk. In an interview with Dohoney, Monk recalls:
110 Dohoney, Ryan (2015) 120. 111 Idem.
‘I knew I was going to be working on [the piece] Dolmen Music. I’m not sure if at the point that I met Julius that I knew the name of the piece... Michael Byron and Rhys Chatham said if you want a bass, you’ve got to get Julius Eastman. I found out that he was doing a concert… at St. Mark’s Church... I loved him immediately… there was Julius in his leather vest and his keys hanging out of his jeans and his dreads. And I said, “I’m Meredith and I’m working on this piece, would you like to be in it?” and he said, “Oh, sure.” You know Julius, “Of course, of course.”’112
The collaboration with Monk and the Vocal Ensemble was only one of many that he maintained during the 1970s. As a result of his connection with Foss, Eastman had regular performances with the Brooklyn Philharmonica. Besides, through Foss, he became also co-director of a multicultural community initiative, which was sponsored by the orchestra. The Brooklyn Philharmonica developed a program including the music of non-white composers. They mobilized a network of composers that had organized themselves as the Society of Black Composers, since 1968. Many members, like Hale Smith, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Omar Clay, Noel Dacosta, Carman Moore, Oliver Lake, and Arthur Cunningham, were featured on the concert series.113
Eastman was an active improviser at these concerts and was ‘drawing on both experimental music and jazz for his unique vocal displays’.114
Eastman’s friend, composer, musician and musicologist Ned Sublette, shares his insights on Eastman’s ‘post-Buffalo’ period:
‘Julius was only on loan to the white music world. Going to New York freed Julius to be who he was. That’s what he was trying to define through his music. He told me once that he hated Louis Armstrong but that he loved Coltrane. Coltrane, he felt, was the one stopped saying ‘I’m here to entertain you. I’m playing this for myself.’’115
Downtown New York in the late 1970s was a ‘gay party’, as Packer describes it, and Eastman seemed, more than ever, to be honouring his ‘membership’. He loved to dance, integrated in the disco scene and was introduced to queer artists such as Arthur Russell – who was an active member of the New York underground disco 112 Idem.
113 Idem: 121. 114 Idem: 122.
