![]() ![]() ![]() To describe him in stridently political language is not to hang an unwanted frame around him Eastman saw himself this way, and discussed his music and life explicitly in those terms. In the premiere performance, a group of extra students quietly walked onstage to play all the notes necessary for this final climax.A black, gay man rattling around loudly in the white, constrained world of classical music, Eastman was a living testament to unbounded American opportunity and woeful American inequality. The music heads into the bass register with some slow octave C#s, and for the last eight minutes a new continuum is built up as a 16-note overtone series on C# (or the equal-tempered approximation thereof), each note in the series being repeated at a tempo proportional to its pitch. Here Eastman switches from noteheads to a pitch-name notation with numbers whose intent is particularly difficult to decipher without the recording. The pitches begin to spread out again until all twelve are being repeated at once perhaps only Eastman, in that era, could use minimalist processes to accumulate into into dense atonality. Following a brief silence, the repeating Bb returns, and the melody builds back up a half-step lower. Twelve minutes into the piece the texture thins down to just the notes A and B, and a delicate melody spreads downward through the ensemble: B-A-F#-E-D-A-B. The piece is largely a long continuum of repeated notes, starting on a Bb, then with an Ab-A-Bb motive thrown in, then an alternating C-Bb, next a D-Eb, then an E alternating with silences, and so on, the pitch combinations changing in leisurely periods of 90 seconds each. Crazy Nigger, at 54 minutes the longest of the three pieces by far, is also the most abstract for much of the piece it is also the most clearly notated, though toward the end it devolves into mere pitch names as Eastman pursues a sound-process that resists clear definition. The scores to these three works are rather sketchily notated, and considerable interpretation is required on the performers’ part. Most often, new material is added one pitch or motive at a time, though subtractions of material are more abrupt. ![]() There’s an attmept to make every section contain all the information of the previous sections, or else, taking out information at a gradual and logical rate.” By “not exactly perfect yet” Eastman seemed to mean that the process was not strict, but intuitively shaped. There are 99 names of Allah, and there are 52 niggers.”Įastman went on to explain that the three pieces were written using a concept he called “organic form,” related to the additive process of minimalist music, which was still fairly new: “That is to say, the third part of any part has to contain all of the information of the first two parts, and then go on from there… They’re not exactly perfect yet. In response to a protest by the campus African-American student organization, the titles were left off the program, and in a pre-concert talk Eastman explained, in his eloquent deep bass, that he used the offensive word to honor the African-American’s role in American history: “What I mean by niggers is, that thing which is fundamental that person or thing that attains to a basicness or a fundamentalness, and eschews that which is superficial, or, could we say, elegant. Using Northwestern student pianists, Eastman premiered three works for four pianos, with incendiary titles: Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerilla. He had been invited by faculty composer Peter Gena, who, like Eastman, had been a member of the Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo (a performance group run by composers Lukas Foss and Morton Feldman). On January 16, 1980, renegade composer/singer/pianist Julius Eastman gave a concert of his works at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. Michael Lorenz, Quinn Collins, John Pettit, Marc Jaffee, Ben Rosen, Travis Woodson, Joshua Hey, Brian McBrearty, James Merle Thomas, Alban Bailly, David Middleton, Dylan Reis, George Korein, Matt Hollenberg, and Alex Lewis ![]() *version for 14 electric guitars by Dustin Hurt Joseph Kubera, Dynasty Battles, Michelle Cann, Adam Tendler - pianos Program: Julius Eastman: SPOKEN INTRO (1980)Īrchival recording of Eastman's explanation of the use of "Nigger" in the title of his compositions. This concert features two of the works performed as a piano quartet and Gay Guerrilla performed by a large ensemble of electric guitars. Eastman perfected his multifarious minimalism in three works of the late seventies: Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla. Each work is scored for multiple instruments of the same kind. ![]()
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