fails to sing

I first learned of Julius Eastman (1940-1990) through Nico Muhly.

During a preliminary lunch that included talk of Bjork, Philip Glass,
Arabic calligraphy, Meredith Monk, and any number of elements that could
or should have an influence on what we were both loathe to call "new music,"
Muhly (himself a composer) told me, during the jaunty albeit brief e-mail
correspondence that followed our lunch, of a black composer and singer named
Julius Eastman.

"You should check him out," Nico said. "They're planning a
celebration at Columbia, and putting his scores back together. Plus,
they've just put his stuff out on CD."

In due course, I made a trip over to Other Music, on Bleecker Street,
here in Manhattan, which stocks an eclectic mix of sound artists:
Cecil Taylor. Japanese yodelers. Betty Davis.

And there, in the bin under his own tab,
Julius Eastman.

Of course, his story appealed to me immediately. The black gay artist
from stony Ithaca, New York, who began taking piano lessons rather
late in adolescence. An apprenticeship at the Curtis Institute, where
he studied composition with A. Constant Vauclain. Early championship by
Lukas Foss. A bit of a home at SUNY Buffalo, where Eastman became part
of that university's Creative Associates, an ensemble of "crackerjack
performers who coalesced around Foss' (and later Morton Feldman's)
presence at that school," as the music historian Kyle Gann tells us in
his knowledgeable introductory booklet to Eastman's collected music,
"Unjust Malaise" (New World Records).

In the accompanying tracks, one is confronted by a torrent of feeling
that is only barely contained in what one is compelled to call a
distinctly asymmetrical sound, by which one means a sound that denies
the "straight" melodic linearity of his contemporaries (Glass, Monk,
etc). Instead, what one hears in Eastman's music are fragments of
discord rubbing against European forms, such as in his chorale piece,
"The Holy Presence of Joan D'Arc" (1981).

As a chorister in his town's Episcopal church, the irony of being an
Africanist presence in a medium-to-high Anglican institution must not
have been lost on Eastman. And one hears it in the round tones of his singing,
as he recites the names of saints other than his Joan—a conceit borrowed, in
all probability, from Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson's
exceptional, high-modernist 1934 homosexualist work,
"Four Saints in Three Acts," wherein sound itself is the narrative.
Eastman's piano sounds "prepared"; a tinkling remnant from Weimar
(and the honky-tonk) with its women in low-down panties,
and men on the down-low in general.

His fortissimos are run-down, too, a line that just got
tuckered-out in the violence that was done to him, and that he did to
himself, as a black gay man who worked or tried to love in a European
context, which is to say the world.

The titles of his pieces constitute an autobiography of sorts:
"If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?" (1977), "Gay Guerilla" (1980),
"Evil Nigger" (1979), and "Crazy Nigger" (1980).

One could call these titles self-limiting, but not if one has survived
being Julius Eastman (or anyone like him), where the soul runs out
of time faster than it should. One wonders what he would have done
with the late Gary Fischer's writing. As a casuality of race, a marginalized sexuality,
and too many options (or not enough) Fischer's journals describe what
it means to be a "gay guerilla" wrapped in the black skin of
difference. All too often, others read that skin and not the mind it
houses: as a battlefield of resistance, or pure consumption.

In any case, one dreams of the opera they would have created:
an indictment of class as it influences culture, and being a marked target in
whatever society that presents itself as such. Both work on the mind
like music or words one cannot hear, songs one fails to sing.