Eastman’s work arrives in its “wild, grand, delirious demonic” glory, with “an uncontainable personality surging into sound” (The New Yorker). His best known works include the urgent, racing Evil Nigger (1979) and the beautiful and melancholic Gay Guerilla (1980). Two years after the piece was first written, Eastman stated in an interview: “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest” (NY Times). In 2016, a recording of his delicate 1974 composition, "Femenine", was released posthumously on Frozen Reeds after the work was found by NYC composer Mary Jane Leach. Eastman is now celebrated as an indispensable outsider in (post) minimalism and as a pioneering minority voice. However, in recent years, his music has garnered a surge of international posthumous acclaim. Homeless, mostly forgotten, and reliant on alcohol and drugs, Eastman died alone of cardiac arrest at the age of 49, and much of his work disappeared along with him. ![]() Towards the end of his life, Eastman’s behaviour became more erratic, and he retreated further into isolation. He translated post-minimalism and post-Cageian radicalism into a buoyant musical language friendly to the ears of the liberated disco generation. Ryan Dohoney, John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego, in Tomorrow Is the Question. During his ensuing time in New York City, his diverse activities as a composer and musician all served to bridge the gap between the ‘uptown’ (i.e. 2015, Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (eds. Cage was furious and Eastman left Buffalo soon after. His involvement in the academic strata of contemporary music was intermittent and turbulent – in 1975, during a performance of John Cage’s Song Books at SUNY Buffalo, where Eastman held a stipend, he invited a young man onstage to undress him and made sexual gestures under Cage’s instruction to “give a lecture”. ![]() He was praised for his role as solo baritone on the 1973 Grammy-nominated recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, conducted by Pierre Boulez he was the first man in Meredith Monk’s esteemed vocal ensemble he was also a close collaborator of Arthur Russell’s (among other things, he appeared as an organist and vocalist in the 1981 Dinosaur L production 24-24 Music). Although also active as a dancer and choreographer, he was better known during the seventies and eighties for his work as a versatile vocalist. His affinity for the piano as a child led to his acceptance to the prestigious Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he went on to switch majors to composition. Eastman tested limits with his political aggressiveness, as reflected in legendary scandals like his June 1975 performance of John Cages Song Books, which. Eastman was born in Ithaca, New York in 1940.
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