![]() ![]() The necessity of this approach becomes increasingly apparent as one reads on. The book considers his work as both a composer and performer, but refuses to separate this from his life and the contexts in which he lived and work. ![]() No wonder, then, that Gay Guerrilla, which takes its name from one of Eastman’s compositions, entwines the personal, musical, social and cultural. Where notations exist, it is not always clear how one should work with them. All this, along with the sketchy recorded documentation of his work, means that performing or getting to hear Eastman’s music is by no means straightforward. Moreover, the circumstances of Eastman’s increasingly chaotic life and his apparent disregard for possessions meant that scores, sketches and other forms of documentation were often lost, temporarily or permanently. Eastman’s work deserves attention in itself and for its place in the development of minimalist, postminimalist and experimental composition, but also for its recalcitrance its refusal to sit easily within any one musical style or the conventions of a practice, and its inseparability from issues of identity and culture.ģ Some of Eastman’s work was traditionally notated, but he also worked with improvisation, and some of his compositions use systems of notation that provide an overall structure, indications of melodic figures and harmonic and rhythmic content, but not the full detail: often this was developed in rehearsal with players (sometimes with Eastman performing). Hisama in the collection Rethinking Difference in Musical Scholarship, 1 almost everything on Eastman is written by those who also contribute to this book. Even now, excepting a recent chapter by Ellie M. Indeed, very little previous scholarship on Eastman exists: only in the last few years has that started to change. ![]() 1 Hisama Ellie M., “‘Diving into the earth’: the musical worlds of Julius Eastmann”, Bloechl Olivie, (.)Ģ Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music is the first book devoted to Eastman.To become absorbed in his musical world is necessarily to wonder why Eastman gained insufficient recognition in his lifetime, and hence to consider bigger questions about the relationship between the musical and the socio-cultural: between musical styles, practices, production, promotion and reception, and identity, race and sexuality. To be both delighted by this music and troubled by the questions it provokes is surely the point. I wanted to work with my students on his music for multiple pianos, but how does a white, middle class English woman deal with presenting a piece called Crazy Nigger in the north of England in the early twenty-first century? How would this title be received, especially when audiences don’t know anything about the composer or his music? But Eastman knew what he was doing. Both exciting and troubling in the challenges the music presents: challenges for both performing and listening, but also through some of Eastman’s titles. Troubling, because it was hard to understand why I and many of my colleagues, whether performers, composers or musicologists, didn’t already know this music. Lewis has noted in his foreword to this volume, p. xv). Exciting, too, because of the striking differences to those better known minimalist works: the noticeable differences in the development of musical ideas, in the ways players determine progression through the work, and in the harmonic language with, by turns, striking explorations of the harmonic series, octotonic structures, and echoes of jazz harmonies – a more ‘ecstatic affect’ than contemporaneous minimalism (as George E. Exciting because this music grabbed me similarly, in certain respects, to now canonic minimalist pieces such as Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians : the emergence of rhythmic grooves from sustained repetitive pulsation, the endless overtonal variety from combined instrumental sonorities, the difference-within-repetition over a sustained timeframe, and the organic interdependency of harmony and rhythm all produce, for me, a deeply pleasurable intensity a subjective absorption in nuance emerging from an objectified, openly inviting process. ![]() 1 As someone who first became interested in ‘new’ music as a student in the late 1980s, and has continued playing, studying, writing about and teaching music by composers variously considered to be minimalist, postminimalist and experimental (amongst other denominations), my first encounter with the music of Julius Eastman, in 2012, was exciting but also troubling. ![]()
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