#Julius eastman series
#Julius eastman free

Any term used to characterize today’s musical landscape-”genre fluid” or the like-was anticipated by Eastman decades before yet he was punished for being ahead of his time, both in the treatment of his music and, tragically, his person. Eastman is a special case, a composer whose music shines like a retroactive beacon to today’s musical creators. This album represents a departure for New Amsterdam Records, which until this point has exclusively released new music by active, living composers. The recorded performance reflects a blend of strict adherence to Eastman’s specific instructions with an embrace of individual and collective decision-making within the ensemble, a continuous three-way conversation between Eastman, the individual members of Wild Up, and the group as a whole. In Wild Up’s unique 70-minute interpretation of Eastman’s open score, the ensemble is challenged to work in dialogue with the composer’s own creative impulses in doing so, the band channels his individualistic spirit, augmenting “Femenine” with strategically placed solos-individual cantor-like proclamations. And in 1990, at age 49, Eastman died in Buffalo, New York, less than a decade after the New York City Sheriff’s Department threw most of his scores, belongings, and ephemera into the East Village snow. He swerved through academia, discos, Europe, Carnegie Hall, and the downtown experimental music scene. Simultaneously static and active, “Femenine” lulls listeners into musical reverie.Įastman was young, gay, and Black at a time when it was even more difficult to be young, gay, and Black. Within “Femenine,” Eastman, whose music The New Yorker hailed as “brazen and brilliant,” evolves material based on a two-note, 13-beat “prime” melody-a cosmic clamoring of bells. 1: Femenine is the opening entry in Wild Up’s multi-volume anthology celebrating Eastman, the late composer whose amalgamated musical vision was repeatedly dismissed during its day, but is now being unearthed to critical acclaim.Ĭhampioned by The New York Times for their “boisterously theatrical sensibility,” Wild Up slowly comes alive inside this recording of “Femenine,” the epitome of Eastman’s longform “organic music”-where phrases live inside of phrases, multiple layers ebbing and flowing with the passage of time.

#Julius eastman series

Following a series of personal struggles and misfortunes such as eviction from his apartment for non-payment of rent and the confiscation of his possessions including his musical scores, Eastman returned to Buffalo, where he died in 1990 at age 49.īy Renée Levine Packer, Co-editor (with Mary Jane Leach) and contributor, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (University of Rochester Press, 2015.Out now, Los Angeles-based musical collective, Julius Eastman Vol.

#Julius eastman free

From 1976 until his death in 1990, Eastman’s “model of musicianship,” as music historian Ryan Dohoney terms it, “expanded to include free Jazz, improvisation, new wave rock, disco, as well as his own composed music that is marked by intense repetition and political aggressiveness.” This “political aggressiveness” is evident in the series of multi-piano pieces that Eastman wrote with provocative titles such as Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla. During this period he performed with Arthur Russell, Meredith Monk, Peter Zummo, and others in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and the Brooklyn Academy of Music to downtown lofts and disco clubs. In the summer of 1976, Eastman moved to New York City where he became part of the “downtown” New York music scene. During his highly productive years in Buffalo, he composed Thruway a ballet score, The Moon’s Silent Modulation Macle Trumpet Colors and Stay On It among other pieces. In Buffalo, his colleagues at the new music center included Petr Kotik, Gwendolin Sims, James Fulkerson, Jan Williams, and Morton Feldman. In the late sixties, he moved to Buffalo, New York, where he was invited by composer-conductor Lukas Foss to join the prestigious university-based new music group, the Creative Associates, eventually becoming a member of the University of Buffalo music faculty. He studied piano and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, graduating in 1963. Julius Eastman was born in New York City and raised in Ithaca, New York.