5 - Julius Eastman Singing

Summary

The last time I saw Julius Eastman was in London. He was touring in 1974 with the Creative Associates from the State University of New York at Buffalo; they performed in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, and Julius was playing the piano in Morton Feldman's For Frank O’Hara. That was just one of his activities. The ensemble also had a piece by Julius, Stay On It, in their repertory for the tour. Julius seemed fine. He was then thirty-four years old.

Julius's name came up more recently, now many years later, in Essen, Germany, when my colleague at the Folkwang University of the Arts, Patricia Martin, loaned me the multi-CD recording of Julius's music that she had just received. She had played one of the pianos in the famous 1980 performance of his music at Northwestern University in Chicago. To hear the music on the CDs (as well as the spoken defense of his work that is included) is to wonder at his mastery as a composer, singer, and articulate polemicist.

It is sometimes said that certain artists lack discipline. Julius Eastman was often accused of that. Nonetheless, he had enough discipline to develop his abilities to a professional level in several areas: as a pianist, dancer, singer, and composer. Of course, the task of organizing these various talents is always difficult for anyone with such gifts. Being black and gay cannot have made things easier for him, but it may have given him the impetus of anger, fear, and defiance that he needed to pursue such a range of ambitions. I think I should mention, as well, the love he had for so many things, and his humor. If he was provocative, it was because he lived in a prejudiced and repressive time, place, and society, where art can be trivialized, black people cruelly discriminated against, and gays censored, not for what they do, but for who they are.

I am primarily concerned here with Julius's work as a singer. Singing for him, of course, was simply another area where he excelled. He was not a tall person—physically he was rather spindly—but in singing he seemed to spread out.