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Julius eastman9/18/2023 The length of the performance was a grid that Eastman used to guide his ensemble’s improvisations. Aside from that, it’s up to Eastman and the other members of his orchestra to sustain the audience’s interest over the next hour. Along with the bells’ rhythm, this vibraphone motif-both optimistic and energetic-is the backbone of the piece. Before too long, the piece begins in earnest with a catchy vibraphone line: one that starts with fast, one-note repetition, before ascending in see-saw fashion up a narrow interval. In the recording’s opening minutes, Eastman plays a few chords and notes as the other members of the chamber ensemble tune up. As Leach told the musician and writer David Menestres, Femenine offers “the fluidity of jazz and a swing that is missing from, especially, Reich.” That Eastman could simultaneously be a prankster and a skilled style-scout was one aspect of his genius whereas he’d copped R&B textures for a prior composition, Stay on It, with Femenine, Eastman was scouring his avant-garde contemporaries for inspiration. It can be read as both a Fluxus-style joke on the stark rhythmic processes of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as an assumption of that sound into the overall Eastman palette. Artists in the Fluxus movement outfitted a violin with a rod-twirling motor that slapped away like the meekest torture device imaginable.įor Femenine, Eastman’s machine automated the shaking of sleigh bells for the entirety of the performance. In an era before drum programming, inhuman percussion had a jokey, improbable tinge. And then there is laughter, as a performer switches on a mechanical device that shakes sleigh bells. The first sound you hear on this recording is an audience casually settling down. Better than any recording currently circulating, it’s on Femenine that listeners can get a sense of how Eastman fused jazz-informed improvisation with the rigors of early, pulse-based minimalism.Īnd there is also a suggestion of Eastman’s humor-an attribute sometimes overshadowed by the seriousness of his politics and the tragedy of his death. Though it doesn’t offer an expansive look at his compositional growth like Unjust Malaise, it gives us a better sense of Eastman as a bandleader and performer of his own works. In creative terms, it’s a crystal-clear, 72-minute shot that reaffirms what all the veteran scholars and performers have been talking about for decades. In terms of sonic fidelity, this is an occasionally scratchy live recording of a chamber orchestra performance from November 6, 1974, with Eastman at the piano. The release of Femenine, however, is an occasion for wide celebration. Still, the primary stumbling block to any greater revelry has been a lack of recorded evidence of Eastman’s own performances. And along with Renée Levine Packer, Leach has edited an important book of essays covering every aspect of Eastman’s career. Jace Clayton reinterpreted two of those works on a 2013 album. In 2005, a three-CD set on New World Records, Unjust Malaise, brought several of Eastman’s most notorious compositions into wide circulation. Contemporaries like Kyle Gann and Mary Jane Leach have pooled rare recordings and fragments of scores, and found new material in archives. Thankfully, the last decade has seen a renaissance in Eastman appreciation. Yet for a long time, hardly anyone pursued either activity-largely because much of his music had been scattered to the winds prior to his death in 1990. After he died, alone in a Buffalo hospital at age 49, it took eight months for an obituary to be published.Įastman can be almost as fascinating to read about as he is to listen to. Details from his homeless period are sketchy (or contested), but it’s generally agreed that he lived in Tompkins Square Park and also suffered from some form of addiction. Most of his scores were bagged and carted away-eventually lost to history. Then he faded from view.Īfter alienating lovers and collaborators alike, Eastman was evicted from his apartment in the mid-’80s. He contained so much art and vision as to be a scene unto himself. These were moves that obscured Eastman’s stated desire to face up to “that thing which is fundamental” in American society. And Eastman’s confrontational “nigger series” of compositions-including pieces like Nigger Faggot, Crazy Nigger, and Evil Nigger-were sometimes truncated on concert bills, due to pressure from well-meaning protestors and risk-averse programmers. His explicit, queer reframing of John Cage’s Song Books famously enraged Cage himself. While in the company of such elites, Eastman challenged the norms of etiquette with a potency that guaranteed scandal.
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