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Julius Eastman: The resurrection of the visionary minimalist composer continues
04.01.2019
01:33 pm
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The music and person of Julius Eastman came to my attention in a weird sort of “table tapping” Ouija board kinda way. A ghostly message from the beyond if you believe in that sort of thing, but how else to explain it? I will present here the unlikely sequence of events as they happened and you can decide for yourself. As I don’t think it would have been possible to make something like this up—it would be pointless to lie in public about something so inconsequential, I think you’ll agree, plus I have the receipts—the readers are asked to put themselves into my shoes as I report what happened and to ask themselves how they would react given the same hard-to-ignore input.

Okay, so one day in February of 2018—the 21st to be exact—I went on to Discogs and ordered a copy of Meredith Monk’s Dolmen Music. It’s one of my favorite albums and I decided that I finally needed to own it on vinyl. I was ordering a lot of stuff from Discogs around that time, and when the Monk LP arrived, it was on a day when several other records came in the post along with it. Stuffed in the box with one of them—a Dream Warriors album it was—were two full copies of the Chicago Reader newspaper, one of them bearing a striking portrait of minimalist composer Julius Eastman with his eyes closed in a sort of beatific “I like what I am hearing” manner (see above). The title of the cover story was “The world catches up to iconoclastic composer Julius Eastman.” Intrigued, I put it aside and continued using a kitchen knife to unwrap my pile of Discogs vinyl bounty. While I was doing this, I was listening to Dinosaur L’s (Arthur Russell) 24->24 Music, which has as its distinctively bored female vocalist, Jill Kroesen, an artist I worked with briefly in a high end video post production facility in 1986.

A bit later I was settling in with the Meredith Monk album and I picked up the Chicago Reader and started reading about Julius Eastman. Here’s how that article—by Yale University’s Kerry O’Brien—begins:

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. His obituary in the Village Voice wouldn’t appear till eight months later. He’d lost most of his possessions (probably including his scores) when he lost his apartment, and no commercial recordings of his pieces existed. It became nearly impossible for musicians to play his work, or for listeners to hear it. In life, Eastman had been unforgettable: outspoken, provocative, brilliant, unapologetically queer and black. But the lonely circumstances of his death threatened to erase him from memory.

The essay goes on to explain how Eastman’s legacy, or some part of it at least, had been preserved by the tenacious efforts of composer Mary Jane Leach and how Eastman’s reputation has steadily risen in the years following the release of the remarkable three CD set Unjust Malaise in 2005. That this compilation single handedly carved out a posthumous place for the composer in the minimalist pantheon. There have been numerous classical music festivals with programs devoted to his works as well as high profile premieres of some of his thought lost scores. A book Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music edited by Leach with Renée Levine-Packer was published in 2015.
 

 
Fascinating stuff, right? Eastman seemed like some kind of mysterious, barely-recalled musical supernova—like Robert Johnson—which made me want to find out more about him. Naturally I dialed up his Wikipedia entry where I read:

He served as the first male vocalist in Meredith Monk’s ensemble, as documented on her influential album Dolmen Music (1981). He fostered a strong kinship and collaboration with Arthur Russell, conducting nearly all of his orchestral recordings (compiled as First Thought Best Thought [Audika Records, 2006]) and participating (as organist and vocalist) in the recording of 24-24 Music (1982; released under the imprimatur of Dinosaur L), a controversial disco-influenced composition that included the underground dance hits “Go Bang!” and “In the Corn Belt”; both featured Eastman’s trademark bravado.

Wut? All of the above transpired between me getting the mail that afternoon and maybe two hours later. It felt as though the universe really, really wanted me to discover the name Julius Eastman on that day, does it not? See what I mean by the occulty table-tapping nature of this fairly unambiguous message?

So I went to Amazon only to find that they had, at that moment, exactly zero copies of the Unjust Malaise collection for sale, but they did have a 2017 release of Eastman performing in Zürich in stock so I bought that. When the CD arrived a couple of days later, I saw that The Zürich Concert had been recorded on my 14th birthday, October 25, 1980.
 

 
That’s pretty specific. How would one begin to calculate the mathematical odds for and against something like that happening? Run the film backwards in your mind. Had the Discogs dealer not stuffed the newspapers into the mailer to protect my Dream Warriors record I’d probably still be unaware of Julius Eastman to this day. And minus that issue of the Chicago Reader arriving at my doorstep on the same day as Dolmen Music precisely at a moment when I was unknowingly listening to Eastman playing keyboards and singing on the Dinosaur L album there would have been no seance-like connections for me to make that afternoon. Nor would I have had the shock of seeing my birthday emblazoned across the back of the Zürich show CD just a couple days later. Weird right? It gets better: from reading more about him, I also found that Eastman—like hundreds of other homeless people at that time—had been living in Tompkins Square Park after his eviction in the 1980s. During much of that decade, the apartment I lived in was but a few yards away from Tompkins Square Park. He began to look very familiar to me in photos. It’s not at all outside the realm of possibility that I could have clapped eyes on him walking around the East Village, or even interacted with the man in some way. (I can picture a guy who looked like Eastman in a motorcycle jacket selling books behind a table on the sidewalk next to the park, and although that’s a pretty hazy recollection from a long time ago—if it’s even that—I can’t shake it either.)

Such a cluster of mathematically improbable occurrences like that would cause anyone’s antenna to perk up, so naturally I decided to take a closer look at the music of Julius Eastman. After such a fateful and portentous introduction, I can assure you that I was anything but disappointed by what I heard.
 

Julius Eastman and poet R. Nemo Hill
 
Eastman’s music is, first and foremost, intense. Intensely intense. In some of his fully developed later pieces, the score will call for four grand pianos to be violently pounded. HAMMERED. The effect is more percussive, and physical, than strictly musical as a furious cascade of notes are unleashed like a dam bursting. When we think of the minimalist masters—Philip Glass, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Terry Riley—the collective notion we have of what that school of music tends to sound like is one of mathematical precision and carefully measured repetition and drones that changes slowly—or even glacially in the case of La Monte Young—as it goes along, building and building and ultimately resolving in some sort of ecstatic crescendo. Eastman developed a composing technique he called “organic music,” a musical process in which each cumulatively overlapping section contains, simultaneously, all the sections which preceded it. The end result being a holographic maelstrom of sound. Eastman’s minimalism is uniquely his own and expands the idea of what that music is, and can be in the future.

Eastman’s mature music is an all over bath of sound. An incessant deluge of it. I’d compare his music to standing in a warm rain that is turning into a ferocious hurricane. The notes can feel like they are pelting your body like hailstones. It’s tactile, physical, frenzied, like a few bars of a Jerry Lee Lewis stomper repeated over and over again with great passion and precision. To experience it in person must be overwhelming.
 

 
It’s a cruel understatement that Eastman’s talents were largely unrecognized during his lifetime, but the remarkable way his music has been rediscovered and celebrated in the past fifteen years is almost unprecedented. Hildegard of Bingen, Nick Drake, Eastman’s collaborator Arthur Russell and the aforementioned Robert Johnson all come to mind with their unlikely posthumous fame. The pace of this increased interest is accelerating as more of Eastman’s scores have been found or transcribed from extant recordings (and even a photograph). We will probably never get a full and complete picture of the man’s life; neither will we ever hear all of his music. Some of it will remain lost. But what we do have of Julius Eastman’s music is precious and powerful. Minimalism’s Mt. Rushmore now has a fifth face.

Additionally his “arrival” in the canon of modern classical music has to be the most freeing event for the genre in decades, even if few recognized the prophet during his first go ‘round. The possibilities for the future inherent in Eastman’s style of more playful, more passionate minimalism seem wide open again and this bodes well for terms like “Eastmanian” and “Post Eastmanist” to enter the lexicon. As they should.

Now, where to start with Julius Eastman’s work? The motherlode is Unjust Malaise box set.
 

 
There is a fine example of Eastman as performing concert pianist in the form of The Zürich Concert which luckily was recorded on a cassette by a Swiss friend of his who had organized the performance. This is how it’s described in the press release:

Listening to this recording, one is overwhelmed by the cascades of sound, the power of the playing. It almost seems as if the piano will start bouncing across the floor like an out-of-control washing machine. But there is also space and delicacy in the playing.

That’s an on-the-money description, I can assure you. Another surviving concert was a 1974 performance of Eastman’s “Femenine” by the S.E.M. Ensemble with the composer himself on piano. Sadly, neither of these recordings is anywhere close to being “high fidelity,” but luckily Apartment House have just released their version of “Femenine” on the Another Timbre label and it’s absolutely exquisite. (Apartment House will be playing Eastman’s “Femenine” live at Intonal experimental music festival, April 24-25 2019 in Malmö, Sweden.)
 

 
For those of you who have read this far, and who own a turntable, you might want to grab a copy of the Blume label’s regrettably titled two-record set of The N*gger Series, which includes three mind-boggling mature pieces—“Evil N*gger,” “Crazy N*gger” and “Gay Guerilla.” (Eastman’s political and confrontational titles—which meant that things went less smoothly for his career than they could have—were allegedly somewhat inspired by Richard Pryor’s comedy albums.) The Blume set—despite a title bound to see its distribution limited—is the real jewel of what Julius Eastman left behind. All three numbers were included on the Unjust Malaise CD set, but here they’ve been mastered for vinyl by Giuseppe Ielasi who did an outstanding job of it. The pressing, on purple vinyl, sold out of its initial run and is now back in stock at Forced Exposure. It’s not cheap, but as there are but a few hundred of these floating around out there, it’s not going to get any cheaper. If you want it you might want to jump on it pronto is what I am saying.

I highly recommend listening to David Garland’s (fantastic) “Spinning on Air” podcast about Eastman. Not only did Garland know Julius Eastman personally, he saw him perform several times and interviewed him on Columbia University’s college radio station in 1984. This is apparently one of the few recorded interviews that Eastman ever did, and it’s absolutely fascinating. You’ll note his odd accent and it sounds like he’s pretty drunk, too, but I thought this was just amazing.

I can’t embed it here, but if you will click on over to Vimeo, you can see what is believed to be the sole videotape of Eastman playing one of his own compositions (“Stay On It”) live with the Creative Associates in Glasgow, 1974. Part 2 is here.
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.01.2019
01:33 pm
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Einstein on The Street: Philip Glass and ‘Sesame Street’ introduce kids to geometry and Minimalism!
07.17.2013
12:30 pm
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“Geometry of Circles” is a series of animated shorts created for Sesame Street in 1979 with music by Philip Glass.

From the Muppet Wiki:

The shorts consist of the movement of six circles (each with a different color of the rainbow) that are formed by and split up into various geometric patterns. Glass’s music underscores the animation in a style that closely resembles the “Dance” numbers and the North Star vignettes written during the same time period as his Einstein on the Beach opera.

Below, all four of the “Geometry of Circles” animations produced by Glass and The Children’s Television Workshop:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.17.2013
12:30 pm
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What is not seen: An interview with artist Agnes Martin
09.18.2011
04:04 pm
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image
 
She once wrote:

“In my best moments I think ‘Life has passed me by’ and I am content.”

The outside world didn’t clutter Agnes Martin’s mind. When she died at ninety-two it was said that she hadn’t read a newspaper for fifty years - her vision was focussed solely on her art.

“To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.”

Giving up the things you do not like is always easier when your life is insulated by money, but that kind of insulation didn’t come until Martin was in her late forties. Born in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912, her father died when she was two, leaving her mother with five children to bring up. In such difficult circumstances, Agnes didn’t have the opportunity to develop her artistic interests, but she was fully aware of the beauty that surrounded her, which inspired her belief she had the talent to paint it.

When she was twenty-four, Agnes traveled to New York, where her visits to the museums and galleries convinced her to be an artist.  It took time, for twenty years Martin worked as a teacher, painted every day and burnt her pictures every night, until she was ready. She moved to New Mexico, where food and rent were cheap. Her decision was to paint until her savings ran out, then to starve. She was lucky, the legendary art dealer, Betty Parsons, whose gallery had been the focus for the Abstract Expressionist movement, saw her work in New Mexico in 1957. It led to Martin’s first major show in 1958. It was the start of her successful career that lasted until her death in 2004.

Martin’s work was spiritual and she once described her paintings as being “not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.”

“When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.”

This rare interview with Agnes Martin was recorded at her studio in Taos, New Mexico, by Chuck Smith and Sono Kuwayama, in November 1997, and is quite a revealing and inspirational film.
 

 
With thanks to Surbhi Goel
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.18.2011
04:04 pm
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