Minimalism enabled Eastman’s flowering, but, as Matthew Mendez writes, in “Gay Guerrilla,” his approach to the genre was “hard to pin down: arch, and not a little tongue in cheek.” In 1973, Eastman wrote “Stay on It,” which begins with a syncopated, relentlessly repeated riff and a falsetto cry of “Stay on it, stay on it.” There’s a hint of disco in the festive, propulsive sound. As it happens, Paul Tai, who runs New World, once hired Eastman to work at the old downtown Tower Records. A three-disk set on the New World label, “Unjust Malaise” (Borden’s anagram of Eastman’s name), gives a superb overview. Only after years of detective work, led by Leach, has a corpus of scores been assembled. By the end of the sixties, he had joined the Creative Associates program at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which, under the direction of Lukas Foss, had become a center of avant-garde activity.Īfter Eastman’s death, his manuscripts were scattered, and some vanished. There his interests shifted from piano to composition. In his teen-age years, he showed talent as a pianist, and in 1959 he began studying at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, one of the country’s leading music schools. Eastman grew up in Ithaca, New York, singing in boys’ choirs and glee clubs. “Gay Guerrilla” opens with an extended biographical essay, by Packer, that feels ready for adaptation as a harrowing indie film. But it’s the music that commands attention: wild, grand, delirious, demonic, an uncontainable personality surging into sound. Identity politics has probably played a role in the Eastman renaissance: programming a black, gay composer quells questions about diversity. The London Contemporary Music Festival staged three days of Eastman concerts in December Monday Evening Concerts, in Los Angeles, will present an Eastman program on January 23rd and the Bowerbird ensemble, in Philadelphia, is planning a festival for the spring. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach have edited an anthology of essays about him, entitled “Gay Guerrilla.” A recording of Eastman’s 1974 piece “Femenine,” on the Frozen Reeds label, has won praise from classical and pop critics alike. These days, Eastman’s name is everywhere. When he died, in 1990, at the age of forty-nine, months passed before Gann broke the news, in the Village Voice. (One was called “Nigger Faggot.”) As the eighties went on, he slipped from view, his behavior increasingly erratic. He achieved more limited notoriety for works that defiantly affirmed his identity as an African-American and as a gay man. Eastman found a degree of fame in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, mainly as a singer: he performed the uproarious role of George III in Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” in the company of Pierre Boulez, and toured with Meredith Monk. The major revelation, though, has been the brazen and brilliant music of Julius Eastman, who was all but forgotten at century’s end. Andrew Lee has revived Johnson’s vast 1959 work “November,” in which crystalline sonorities gyrate for five hours. The pianist John Tilbury has made a luminous recording, for the Another Timbre label, of Jennings’s early piano pieces, which are minimalist more in the Samuel Beckett sense-spare, cryptic, suggestive. A crucial rediscovery of recent years has been the work of Terry Jennings and Dennis Johnson, who joined Young in his early explorations of stripped-down textures. La Monte Young, whose String Trio of 1958 is widely held to be the starting point of minimalism, steered clear of tonality and maintained an avant-garde posture. According to the familiar narrative, a group of composers led by Terry Riley, Reich, and Glass rejected modernist thorniness, opened themselves to pop and non-Western influences, and came home to simple chords and a steady pulse. With the canonization of minimalism has come a reconsideration of its mythology. Kyle Gann, Keith Potter, and Pwyll ap Siôn’s “Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music,” the most comprehensive treatment to date, covers everything from John Adams’s “Harmonielehre” to the electronic drone pieces of Éliane Radigue. Boxed sets have been issued, academic conferences organized, books published. (Reich’s was in October Glass’s is on January 31st.) Arvo Pärt, the auratic “mystic minimalist” from Estonia, received similar genuflections when he turned eighty, in 2015. This season, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are being celebrated worldwide on the occasion of their eightieth birthdays. Minimalism, the last great scandal-making revolution in twentieth-century music, has become venerable. Eastman, all but forgotten at century’s end, is now seen as a brazen pioneer.
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