Le compositeur, pianiste et chanteur américain Julius Eastman (1940 - 1990) était noir,

homosexuel, et radical. Adoubé dans les années 70 par ses pairs de l'avant-garde qui voyaient
en lui la voix la plus importante de sa génération, il est mort oublié du public comme des
institutions après sept années de «martyre volontaire», entre substances et errances de foyer
pour sans-abri en jardin public. Autant de détails biographiques sombres et spectaculaires qui
tissent une tragédie idéale pour notre époque avide de vies de mavericks et d'injustices de
l'histoire des arts à corriger.

Sauf que ce compositeur longtemps mal identifié dans l'underground (il a collaboré avec
Arthur Russell, Meredith Monk ou Peter Maxwell Davies) en a fait la thématique électrique
d'œuvres aux titres immédiatement évocateurs - Evil Nigger, Nigger Faggot…

«Agressif». Aussi, son tempérament explosif avait été jusqu'à irriter le pape de la musique en
liberté lui-même, John Cage, quand, au mitan des années 70, il transforma une performance
d'une des Song Books de l'Américain à la très libertaire université de Buffalo en une
«conférence-performance lubrique» - en vérité, un exposé sur le colonialisme et la sexualité,
impliquant le déshabillage d'un couple ponctué de signes extérieurs de séduction. Présent dans
l'assistance, Cage poussa des cris d'orfraie, se disant furieux de ce qu'Eastman avait fait de son
art, lui reprochant son manque de rigueur comme son «ego renfermé sur son homosexualité»
(Cage lui-même était bisexuel).

Désormais reconnu comme un événement emblématique de l'histoire des avant-gardes

américaines à la croisée des chemins, le scandale eut surtout à l'époque pour conséquence le
départ précipité d'Eastman de son poste de professeur de composition. Pourquoi était-il si
«politiquement agressif», comme le décrit Kyle Gann, grand critique des nouvelles musiques
chez Village Voice qui a écrit sa nécrologie et les notes de pochette de la première anthologie
à lui avoir été consacrée en 2005, Unjust Malaise ?

Jusqu’à quel point son engagement et sa colère étaient-ils motivés par la société et le milieu
artistique où il évoluait - une avant-garde orthodoxe où les compositeurs afro-américains
avant lui, tels Samuel Coleridge-Taylor ou Harry Lawrence Freeman, ont eu les plus grandes
difficultés à travailler - et de quelle manière ont-ils joué en sa défaveur ?

C'est tout le sel de son œuvre récemment redécouverte grâce aux efforts de la compositrice
Mary Jane Leach, qui s'est attelée à la publication de ses enregistrements et à l'édition de ses
partitions perdues. Obsédé par la voix du guerrillero qui «sacrifie sa vie et son sang pour une
cause», Eastman était un compositeur viscéralement innovant dont les expériences du côté du
minimalisme tonal et pulsé à la Steve Reich (Stay on It, Femenine, pour ensemble de chambre
à géométrie variable) ou de la tonalité en liberté (The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, pour
douze violoncelles ou la série des Nigger, pour quatre pianos ou «n'importe quel quatuor d'un
autre instrument») sonnent littéralement habitées d'une volonté d'exposer les conflits qui
l'habitaient.

Baryton. C'est particulièrement audible sur Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc,
œuvre pour voix seule dont nous est parvenue une version fabuleuse chantée par Eastman lui-
même, de sa voix de baryton sépulcral, dont le seul défaut est sans doute de faire de l'ombre
aux futurs musiciens qui auront pour projet de s'en emparer. Signe de l'installation de l'œuvre
de l'Américain dans le paysage, Femenine a fait cette année l'objet de sa première
interprétation enregistrée par un ensemble contemporain, l'ensemble britannique Apartment
House. Le 27 avril au Lieu unique de Nantes, ce seront deux orchestres français, l'Aum Grand
Ensemble et l'Ensemble 0, qui tenteront de régénérer la même œuvre «dense, intense, frôlant
la frénésie, une musique sur le fil». Fil d'une pelote immense qu'on commence tout juste à
dérouler.

Npr.com :

Editor's note: This story includes multiple uses of offensive language.

There have been many misfits in classical music, but Julius Eastman stands tall among them.

In a combustible career, the late composer swerved from critical acclaim to gate-crashing
controversy, and from success to homelessness. To be proudly gay as a composer in the 1970s
was brave enough; to be Black and gay in that world, even more so. But that confident self-
awareness enabled Eastman to write music that was challenging, mischievously irreverent and
sometimes ecstatic. Today he's a visionary to many, even if his insistence on incorporating
racial slurs into his titles still ruffles feathers.

Born in Manhattan in 1940, Eastman was a precocious pianist, blessed with a commanding
bass voice. He graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, collaborated with
key musical figures like Pierre Boulez and Zubin Mehta, and taught at the University of
Buffalo. But in the 1980s, after he moved back to New York City, he began spiraling into
unpredictable behavior and rumored addiction. When he died in a Buffalo, N.Y., hospital in
1990, he was just 49 years old and alone. His music was scattered to the winds.

It's only in recent years that friends and scholars have begun slowly shedding light on
Eastman's music and the blurry details of his final, erratic years — and that a newer
generation of musicians has given his work a fresh look. Among those is the Los Angeles-
based ensemble Wild Up, which has just released a singularly jubilant performance of
Eastman's 1974 work Femenine (pronounced feh-meh-NEEN), a mesmerizing 67-minute
groove that unfolds one beautiful moment after another.

Eastman's score for the hour-plus piece is only five pages of manuscript, and the entire work
is based around one melodic building block, a two-note theme in the vibraphone that emerges
from a forest of bells. For Christopher Rountree, Wild Up's founder and artistic director, that
made Femenine a kind of creative sandbox for the musicians to play in.

"It is a short score," Rountree says. "And one that, maybe because of its brevity, encourages
an amazing creative maelstrom. I love that something so gargantuan, like Femenine, can come
from something so succinct."

Composed in a minimalist style for winds, marimba, vibraphone, sleigh bells, piano and bass,
Femenine was prescient for its day, premiering some two years before Steve Reich's lauded
Music for 18 Musicians. In Wild Up's freewheeling performance, it sounds as fresh as ever:
The group adds a few bells (literally) and whistles, both to Eastman's score and the example
set by his own relaxed 1974 recording of the piece.

"The biggest liberty is the inclusion of a dozen or so long solos — all at architecturally
significant moments in the piece," Rountree explains. "Most classical players don't grow up
improvising, but most of the players in Wild Up are composers and improvisers as well."
Along the way, solos pop up for piano, cello, baritone saxophone, flugelhorn and even
vocalists — a nod to Eastman's gifts as a singer, which earned him a 1974 Grammy
nomination for his arresting performance of Eight Songs for a Mad King by Peter Maxwell
Davies.

Near the end of Femenine comes a characteristic Eastman curveball: From the depths of the
roiling ensemble, the hymn tune "Be Thou My Vision" rises momentarily. It's perhaps a
foreshadowing of the religious pieces — One God, Buddha and Our Father — that the artist
would write near the end of his short and tumultuous life.

Eastman's career began auspiciously at the Curtis institute, where he studied with revered
pianist Mieczyslaw Horoszowski at age 19, and played only his own works at his graduation
recital in 1963. The details of his life in the years right after college are sketchier according to
Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and his Music, a 2015 book co-edited by Renée Levine Packer
and Mary Jane Leach, and still the most authoritative text on the composer. But we do know
that in December 1966 he made his New York debut as a soloist at Town Hall, with a
program that mostly featured his own compositions.

In the years that followed, Eastman would breach the boundaries of the classical avant-garde,
a white and Eurocentric club then and now. His collaborators included John Cage, Morton
Feldman and, importantly, Lukas Foss — who, in his position at the State University of New
York at Buffalo, presided over the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, a hothouse of
experimental music. Eastman would have many opportunities to perform his music there over
the years, and would eventually teach at the university beginning in 1970.

Early on, Eastman was characterized as shy, with few friends. But as his personality
blossomed, he became the charismatic, uncompromising artist that many who knew him
remember. His personal motto, which he described to the Buffalo Evening News in 1976, was
"to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual
to the fullest."

When he moved back to New York in the late '70s, he wrote a series of enraptured works that
remain his most controversial. The titles of these pieces, created in 1978 and '79, contain slurs
that most would call slap-in-the-face offensive. The music, though, mesmerizes in a non-
confrontational flow of ideas. Even to presenters and audiences today, the contrast between
the sound of these works and their names — Crazy Nigger, Dirty Nigger, Evil Nigger, Nigger
Faggot, Gay Guerrilla — is nearly as jarring as the names themselves. At a 2019 music
convention in Canada, a concert was canceled because Mary Jane Leach, a composer and
friend of Eastman's, had given a lecture wherein she discussed his works, using their full
titles, preceded by a language warning.

For Eastman, using this language wasn't only about being himself "to the fullest." By
wrapping himself in stereotyped personae, he hoped to raise questions about racism,
homophobia and the power of words to provoke. He faced opposition to the titles firsthand
when he presented his music at Northwestern University on Jan. 16, 1980, and introduced the
works to the audience himself after a decision was made not to print the titles in the program.
In the recording of that concert, released in 2005 as part of a three-disc set of his music, his
introductory comments can be heard:
"Now the reason I use that particular word is because for me it has what I call a 'basicness'
about it. That is to say, I feel that in any case, the first niggers were of course field niggers.
Upon that is really the basis of the American economic system. Without field niggers you
wouldn't really have such a great and grand economy that we have. So that is what I call the
first and great nigger — field niggers. And what I mean by niggers is that thing by which is
fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews
that thing which is superficial or, what can we say, elegant."

As for the work itself, Eastman labeled its undulating and repetitive style "organic music,"
describing the process as mainly additive with a little subtraction as needed. "They're not
exactly perfect, but there is an attempt to make every section contain all of the information of
the previous sections, or else taking out information at a gradual and logical rate." In an essay
that appears in Gay Guerilla, composer and critic Kyle Gann writes that these works stand
apart from the minimalist movement: "At the time, his music seemed an exciting and
eccentric part of what was going on, but looking back today, his pieces sound particularly
distinctive, as though he had not only absorbed minimalism, but could see into its future."

Gradually, Eastman's future looked increasingly grim. Friends and relatives described his
behavior as unpredictable. R. Nemo Hill, once Eastman's lover and roommate, told Packer
that the artist was the architect of his own demise. "He lived the titles of his music," Hill said.
"He was the 'crazy nigger' and the 'gay guerrilla.' He was fearsome. He took aspects of his
identity and foisted them on people in this provocative way." According to Hill, Eastman
never locked the doors of his apartment. Although he was robbed by one of the homeless
people he knew, Hill reports that Eastman would visit the men's shelter to give pedicures. "He
was so brave. He inspired me," Hill said.

Music News
Jace Clayton On Julius Eastman, A Forgotten Voice From New York's Vanguard

In the early and mid-1980s, even while he was having some success composing and
performing with Meredith Monk, Eastman's troubles continued. Drinking and drugs were
suspected. He was evicted from his East Village apartment, given to him by his brother, for
not paying rent. City officials threw his belongings on the street, including what undoubtedly
were numerous manuscripts of his music. (One of those might well have been Masculine, a
companion piece to Femenine for which no score or recording has been found).

The composer George Lewis reports running into Eastman on a midtown Manhattan street in
1984, only to learn that he was staying in a homeless shelter. As the decade wore on, there
was a stint as a Tower Records clerk, and rumors that he was living outdoors in Tompkins
Square. By the time of his 1990 death, he mostly had slipped out of the view of his social
circles. Kyle Gann was among the first to learn of it — some eight months after the fact —
and wrote his belated obituary for The Village Voice.

For reasons we may never know, Eastman died far too young. But he left us much to think
about — on both musical and personal terms. Long before words like "genderqueer" and
"nonbinary" entered common usage, he was modeling his own kind of gender fluidity:
Eastman gave performances of Femenine wearing a dress, and in a 1979 article called "The
Composer as Weakling," he hops freely between pronouns, writing: "The composer is
therefore enjoined to accomplish the following: she must establish himself as a major
instrumentalist, he must not wait upon a descending being, and she must become an
interpreter." Beyond exploring our authentic selves, he seemed to ask that we wave our own
flags vigorously, especially in the face of opposition. It wasn't just his startling music that was
ahead of its time.

Wild Up's new rendition of Femenine takes a page from Eastman's personal playbook: It's
exuberant, a bit in your face, sometimes capricious, and always surprising. It's also just the
first in a series of Eastman recordings the group is planning. What kind of performance
practice will develop around his music, now that more musicians are taking it up, is thrilling
to imagine.

For Rountree, playing Eastman brings out strong feelings. He says that there was dancing,
weeping and "lots of unheard hugging" in the studio after the final take was recorded.

"The most remarkable thing about Julius' music is its ability to send musicians closer to
themselves, to force agency on them, and pull their insides out," Rountree says. "His pieces
inspire creativity, in a totally singular way."

Cambridge.org :

8 - Evil Nigger: A Piece for Multiple Instruments of the Same Type by

Julius Eastman (1979), with Performance Instructions by Joseph
Kubera

Summary
My approach to dissecting Julius Eastman's Evil Nigger, in this case for multiple pianos, is in
the form of an interpretation and description, rather than a strictly theoretical analysis. I also
refer to Joseph Kubera's “General Instructions” (which may be found at the end of this
chapter), that he put together as performance notes for the pianists with whom he has
performed the piece.

Overview

In general, the piece has many elements associated with the minimalist genre. It has short
tonal phrases, played in a steady tempo, that are repeated many times. Its overall structure and
harmonic language, however, are too quirky to completely fall into that mold. It contains very
dramatic harmonic passages, which eventually lead to a nontonal disparate arrhythmic
pointillistic texture of pitches of long duration that seemingly lead nowhere. It uses minimalist
gestures and gradually abandons them for a free-floating ambient atmosphere. The piece
proceeds in precisely notated clock time and takes twenty-one minutes and five seconds to
perform. Each player needs a stopwatch, or some mobile device, showing the passing time in
large numbers so that the changes happen precisely. Although it is not absolutely necessary,
the piece should have a conductor in order for it to proceed smoothly. The recording of the
piece on New World Records (Julius Eastman, Unjust Malaise) employs four pianos, but as
Eastman has explained elsewhere, it could be performed by any group of instruments of the
same type, such as strings or clarinets, but would take more players—anywhere from ten to
eighteen.

Structural Segments

Musically, the piece proceeds with almost constant sixteenth notes played at quarter note =
144 throughout, until the last few minutes. There are twenty-nine sections in all. Kubera's
excellent set of instructions for performers encompasses most of the issues discussed below.

Many sections are subdivided into shorter time segments, so the numbering of events can be
confusing at times. The note events can be played in any octave, and are not limited to the
range of the written note. This implies that the performers can decide ahead of time which
octave they will play in any given section.

Cambridge.org

9 - A Postminimalist Analysis of Julius Eastman’s Crazy Nigger

Summary
No one can deny that Julius Eastman had a unique voice, both literally and compositionally.
Figures such as Kyle Gann, Mary Jane Leach, and Diamanda Galas have all singled out
Eastman's music as being inimitable and unforgettable. However, until recently there has been
little study of what distinguishes his voice. At first glance, an openly gay African-American
composer, championed by the likes of Morton Feldman and Lukas Foss, would provide ample
avenues to explore his work both analytically and hermeneutically. But his erratic career, the
dispersion of his scores, and the cryptic nature of those scores that have been found, make the
performance or even cursory knowledge of his works, much less intensive analysis,
tremendously difficult. The work of Leach, Joseph Kubera, and Cees van Zeeland constitute a
concentration of materials concerning Eastman's late 1970s work Crazy Nigger. Several of the
techniques Eastman used in this work are salient to the listener, such as his bracing
dissonance and the obscuring of minimalism's omnipresent pulse. Through analysis, the
origins of these qualities reveal themselves to be extended tonalities more akin to Stravinsky
and Bartok than the French symbolists, ragas, and modal jazz that informed earlier
minimalists, as well as a larger overall additive process Eastman called “organic music.”

My analysis is based on three sources. The first is a facsimile of an autograph score from
Mary Jane Leach's online compilation of Eastman's scores. The second is a live recording
available on the New World Records CD set Unjust Malaise. This recording dates from a
concert given at Northwestern University as part of his residency there in January 1980,
which featured Eastman as one of four pianists performing Crazy Nigger, along with two
identically scored works: Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla. Like many contemporary minimalist
composers, Eastman's scores were never intended for transmission as much as they were
mnemonic reminders for his own performances. Thus, either a recording or the memories of
performers are vital for the resolution from the score into sounding music.