![]() ![]() One of the 12 chapters present in the anthology is dedicated to the concept of Eastman’s minimalistic and organic music. Among the authors included in Gay Guerilla, there are many musicians who knew and collaborated with Julius Eastman and some scholars who have recently looked into the works of Julius Eastman. The book is the result of long and extensive research on Eastman's life, and it features a lengthy biography written by Packer, followed by several essays, memories, and musical analysis on Eastman’s works. Packer and Leach put the art of a composer who appears to be more contemporary than many artists of the current music scene back on the map. This book is the first complete literature on Eastman’s by two who knew and collaborated with the composer. This album is the first and only large collection of Eastman’s works featuring original recordings and lectures from the 1970s.įollowed by the success of Unjust Malaise, and the widespread interest that was brought to Eastman’s name, Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach edited Gay Guerrilla, published in 2015 by University of Rochester Press. And, although a lot of material was already lost, several years of research led to the release of the three-CD album of his work, Unjust Malaise distributed by the New World Records in 2005. Since the very late 1990s, composer-performer Mary Jane Leach started to dig into the fraught realm of Eastman’s music. For a long time, Eastman’s name disappeared from the contemporary main stage. During his last years, he was living in isolation struggling with mental health issues, and many of his manuscripts and compositions were lost. The news of his death became public through an article in the Village Voice 6 months later. Julius Eastman died in 1990 in Buffalo, NY due to unclear reasons (although many believe that he was suffering from AIDS) after spending months in a shelter. Homosexuality and Afro-Americans’ struggles were topics that made the concert hall audience too uncomfortable at that time, and perhaps they still do. Perhaps the reason why Julius Eastman didn’t become commercially successful like his peers was due to his courage to use music to tell the tribulations of being a gay Afro-American man during the Civil Rights Movement era. He was a brilliant pianist, singer, dancer, and composer, who often collaborated with the most relevant names of that period of American music such as Morton Feldman, Meredith Monk, and Pauline Oliveros. This matter started to bother me since Eastman was a composer well known at his time. After moving to New York City, Julius’ name is closely tied to the New York Downtown Music scene of the 70s, but it’s rare that you’ll find his name in music history textbooks. What might look like a cheap move to get the attention of the class, it was actually the beginning of a wonderful lecture about Julius Eastman, a thoughtful experimental composer whose bravery was bigger than people’s prejudice.Įastman was born in Harlem in 1940 and grew up between Syracuse and Ithaca. He grabbed the marker and started to write down censored words like “Evil N***er,” “N***er F***ot, and “Dirty N***er”. ![]() He preferred to write them instead of naming them because it could have been uncomfortable for himself and the class. One day, my professor decided to write on the blackboard some of Julius Eastman’s most relevant composition titles. I first heard about Julius Eastman in my 20th century Music History class in college, only because I was lucky enough to have a professor who loved to introduce us to the work of composers whose names are not in the textbooks. In the moment I felt deeply connected to the music I was listening to. That night, on that cheap bus, it was like traveling back in time to a cold and dark winter night of some decades ago. I was traveling from New York City, where Eastman has spent many years composing and performing, to Upstate New York, close to where Eastman grew up and started his musical journey. It was getting darker outside, so I decided to listen to Eastman’s music on my phone. I was on a bus for Albany, NY where I was going to visit my family for the holidays. I remember it was the holiday season when I began to read this book, and page after page I started to connect more with Eastman’s music. When my eyes crossed the spine of Gay Guerrilla Julius Eastman and His Music, I knew that my research was over. I had finished one of the hundreds of biographies of Maurice Ravel, and I promised myself that I was going for a new and fresh reading, something that has been written recently. Several months ago I went book shopping in one of my favorite bookstores in Downtown Brooklyn. ![]()
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