#Julius eastman archive#
#Julius eastman series#
#Julius eastman free#

Composer and producer Chris McIntyre reconstructed the Eastman piece Trumpet by consulting a blurry photo and transcribing a 1971 recording. If she actually located a tape, it might be too degraded to salvage. Leach might hear that someone had a tape of a long-ago Eastman radio broadcast, only to find the cassette box empty.

#Julius eastman archive#

With musicologist Renée Levine Packer, she edited the 2015 anthology Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, named after one of the composer’s best-known works.īeginning in the late 90s, Leach and many others laid the groundwork for the accelerating Eastman revival: over nearly two decades, they played exhausting rounds of phone tag with potential sources and made countless inquiries and archive searches, hitting nearly as many dead ends. She assembled the recordings on Unjust Malaise by searching libraries at SUNY Buffalo and Northwestern University as well as the collections of private individuals. Mary Jane Leach, a fellow performer and composer on New York’s downtown music scene in the 80s, has led much of the effort to recover his lost music. He aimed to live an outsize life, and summed up his ideal in a 1976 Buffalo News interview: “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”Įastman’s legacy is still being pieced together today. Those who remember Eastman attest to the brilliance of his artistry, his inimitable and sometimes outrageous personality, and his lifelong preoccupation with spirituality.

#Julius eastman free#

He was also a bass singer of extraordinary depth and dexterity, and as a performer and improviser he traversed a variety of musical communities in New York: not just minimalism but also free jazz and disco. On the afternoon of Sunday, February 25, the Frequency Festival (programmed by Reader critic Peter Margasak) hosts the city’s first Julius Eastman portrait concert, curated by Chicago cellist Seth Parker Woods and held at the Cultural Center’s Preston Bradley Hall.Īs a composer, Eastman practiced an ecstatic, emphatic, and sometimes militant form of minimalism, eventually developing what he called “organic music”-a style of gradual accrual and accumulation, often followed by gradual disintegration. It’s all part of an upwelling of interest in the composer that surpasses anything he enjoyed when he was alive.Įastmania, as this phenomenon is sometimes known, arrives in Chicago in force this week.

#Julius eastman series#

Recent events devoted to Eastman’s music and life include a December 2016 series by the London Contemporary Music Festival, a January 2017 program by Monday Evening Concerts in Los Angeles, and two iterations of a festival called Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental, one last spring in Philadelphia and the other this year in New York. In 2015 the University of Rochester Press published a collection of Eastman scholarship. So far less than half of his catalog has been recovered, but in 2005 the first of many commercial releases of Eastman’s music finally appeared: a three-CD set of archival material called Unjust Malaise (New World). Not everyone could forget such a powerful personality, of course, and years of dogged and loving research-by people who’d known Eastman and those who’d only heard the stories-uncovered partial scores, long-neglected tapes in university libraries, and other fragments of his output. But the lonely circumstances of his death threatened to erase him from memory. In life, Eastman had been unforgettable: outspoken, provocative, brilliant, unapologetically queer and black. It became nearly impossible for musicians to play his work, or for listeners to hear it. He’d lost most of his possessions (probably including his scores) when he lost his apartment, and no commercial recordings of his pieces existed.

His obituary in the Village Voice wouldn’t appear till eight months later. When minimalist composer Julius Eastman died of cardiac arrest in a Buffalo hospital in 1990, the 49-year-old had been homeless for most of a decade.