When scholars describe the life and music of Julius Eastman, one adjective keeps recurring: “fluid.” For the late American composer, pianist, and vocalist, the word has multiple meanings.
Eastman, who lived from 1940 to 1990, embodied gender fluidity before the concept was coined. A proud gay Black man, he sometimes performed one of his signature compositions, Femenine, wearing a dress.
His works also incorporate a wide variety of musical influences. While he is sometimes included among the groundbreaking minimalist composers of his day, such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Eastman crafted earthier compositions that are clearly influenced by the free-jazz movement.
Even more fundamentally, his music can be described as fluid in the sense of “wavelike.” Each of Eastman’s compositions has a shape, but one that is constantly shifting, often in unpredictable ways. And when these works crash onto the shore, they make a mighty noise.
“When you’re inside of the pieces, you feel like you’re being pushed around,” said Christopher Rountree, founder, conductor, and artistic director of the Los Angeles-based ensemble Wild Up, which has taken an active role in the recent revival of Eastman’s music. “The work can carry you away. It can physically move your body. You feel closer to the people around you onstage because the energy is drawing you together.”
“[Eastman] created sonic expression that was raw and organic and real,” said cellist and Wild Up core member Seth Parker Woods. “Disco and early pop influences also find their way [into his work]. Punk and ambient — well before it would be called that — are also there.
“As I’ve lived in his music for so long, I start to hear the amazing Baroque counterpoint that’s embedded in his ensemble writing … as well as the avant-garde and free jazz. The great thing about Eastman is that he had so many creative periods, and he found ways of writing his music that didn’t directly conform to one thing.”
In leading the Eastman rediscovery of late, Wild Up has produced four well-received recordings (a fifth is in process, and a sixth is planned). And on March 29 at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles, members of the group, including Woods, will perform works by this pioneering composer.
A native New Yorker, Eastman studied piano at the Curtis Institute of Music with Mieczysław Horszowski and would play some of his own works on his graduation recital in 1963 and at his New York solo debut at Town Hall in 1966. In the late 1960s, he collaborated with such avant-garde luminaries as John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Lukas Foss; in 1968, Foss invited Eastman upstate to teach at the State University of New York at Buffalo’s progressive Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, where he remained through 1975.
He wrote his most important works after he moved back to New York City in the late 1970s, often choosing deliberately provocative, even offensive titles. (Several include the N-word.) As NPR broadcaster Tom Huizenga explained, by doing so Eastman “hoped to raise questions about racism, homophobia, and the power of words to provoke.”
Eastman’s fortunes declined dramatically in the 1980s, apparently due in part to drug addiction. At one point, he was evicted from his apartment for not paying rent. His death in 1990 went largely unnoticed until The Village Voice’s music critic belatedly heard the news and wrote an obituary nine months later.
Rountree was introduced to the composer’s music around 2010, when Wild Up pianist Richard Valitutto insisted that the conductor listen to a recording of an Eastman piece called Evil N—. “I was blown away,” Rountree recalled. “There was something about the combination of Eastman the activist and provocateur with Eastman the transcendental minimalist that was really striking.”
Inspired to dig deeper, Rountree discovered Stay On It, perhaps Eastman’s best-known piece today. Rountree wanted to bring it to Wild Up, but there was a slight problem: No score existed. So he and the group created one based on the recording of the work’s 1973 premiere at SUNY Buffalo. In 2014, it became the first Eastman piece that the ensemble performed.
Wild Up has since presented Eastman’s works at the 2022 Ojai Music Festival, in 2024 at Stanford Live, and for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, among other appearances.
For some of Eastman’s pieces, “a bare-bones score existed,” Rountree said. “Others had a score and a recording. Those allowed us to triangulate how he made decisions. The scores are so open that you really need some sort of guide to lead you through them. So the recordings became our teacher. It’s been a massive amount of learning.”
And that learning continues.
“There are still moments where we haven’t cracked the code yet,” Rountree said. “We recently played Gay Guerrilla at Disney Hall. At one point, Eastman inserts the hymn ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.’ But he doesn’t say who should play it or in what time. We’ve done some performances in which everybody starts playing the melody simultaneously but at different tempos. We thought we would do it with the organ [in Disney Hall], but [the sound was] too big. So the pianists led us.”
As that experience suggests, Wild Up’s performances “are interpretive,” as Rountree acknowledged. “Sometimes they’re very different from [Eastman’s as preserved on recordings]. His tempos tend to be slower than the ones we pick. His performances tend to feature fewer than 10 people. They’re more brittle. We often play his pieces with about 20 people. They become sound masses.”
Eastman’s The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, which will feature on the REDCAT concert, is written for an ensemble of 10 cellists. In Wild Up’s Grammy-nominated recording, which can be heard at a new exhibit of Eastman art and memorabilia on display until May 4 at REDCAT, Woods plays all the parts. For the concert, he will play one line live to a multitracked recording of himself playing the other nine.
“It’s a true tour de force,” Woods said. “There’s nothing else like it for a monophonic instrument. You have a clear punk rock ostinato that begins the work and then three virtuosic solo lines with tendrils that are spread across the ensemble.
“It truly is spiritual,” the cellist added. “I continue to bear witness to his brilliance, the challenge of completing such an exhaustive and emotional work and trying to replicate a fixed performance of myself that’s forever locked into this recording while making it still feel raw and present.”
The concert will also include an Eastman rarity, That Boy, which Woods transcribed from the recording of the piece’s premiere performance on April 26, 1974. “Julius was on tour with the S.E.M Ensemble in Germany, and thankfully that performance was recorded by the WDR radio,” Woods said. “I believe this is the West Coast premiere. The work is so peaceful and evocative in nature. There are no jagged or hard edges presented in the sonic material, and it slowly evolves to reveal something so introspective and tender. It’s quite transportive.”
For audiences, yes, but perhaps especially for the musicians themselves.
“With any work of Eastman’s, he charges each performer with finding out about themselves through his scores,” Woods said. “There’s no passive performance here; he requires your presence every step of the way. Every performer is making musical and sonic choices that affect the course of the work, so in order to receive that and answer it, one must be present.
“Since so many scores are composed in a sort of shorthand that attempts to free the musician from the mechanical slavery that is the reproduction of a written score, you have to work collectively to decipher a path forward and continue to draw on that. In doing so, you really learn about yourself and your own false limitations and how you work to push beyond those.”
If that sounds a little too new-agey, don’t fret. Rountree argues that this music is very much “of the body.” He put it bluntly: “There is something incredibly sexual about these pieces. You can feel eros around them. Eastman was so out and proud, and that’s present in the work in an extroverted way.”
“Eastman is always hiding something in the music,” added Woods. “At times I believe I’ve figured it all out, and then another performance comes along, and another light bulb goes off. He’s constantly leaving crumbs for me to [find] to better understand who he was and what the music should teach me of self, liberation, authenticity, and presence.”
