Playing his found compositions, the musicians make him their muse without fetishizing him. The feat Wild Up achieves in interpreting Eastman is the refusal to attempt impersonation. Music that spirals and weaves through changes like a child growing up and learning his personality and its maddening fluctuations from lucid to solemn to obscene to exuberant. It takes Wild Up's 30 musicians pursuing a quivering, ephemeral unison to attempt to recreate what he called "organic music," by which he meant music that changes when it acquires new information without evading past information. It's a little unnerving that Eastman is considered a minimalist, when in feeling it's maximalism he inhabits. The laws in the title song are the laws of an endless adolescent rebellion, given sovereignty over itself at the very moment it grows out of the need for it, looking for structure and rules to abide at the precise moment freedom comes. Sometimes, they are even forced into exile from the music while deciphering it. The improvisational, Los Angeles-based music collective Wild Up chose Joy Boy as the title track of its second album-length exploration of Eastman's music, a choice that suggests an intent to revel in his compositions while being bound to impossible laws within them. There can be no answer but to play and replay it, to meet doubt with the resolve to go again, and fear with an allegiance to pleasure. Can its subject, a self-actualized Black man, override its stigma without succumbing to rage or self-sabotage? Is Black joy an indulgent form of self-deception, this music asks. Echoes of vocals that mimic displaced giggling give the composition a haunted atmosphere, as if the sound's potential for conjuring joy is smeared with dread for its very own delights - or the dread of the backlash that Black delight might inspire. ![]() racism that give the term "boy" its fraught legacy, and the reclamation of Black innocence and enjoyment by Black people who demand the language back on its own terms, lives Julius Eastman's Joy Boy - a composition that objectifies the ecstatic self in order to reclaim it in a world that projects suffering onto the Black psyche before it even has a chance to assert jubilance. 2: Joy Boy is more than just music, it's a set of relations and modes of comporting in the world that risk trading fleeting, worldly praise to regain the eternal soul.īetween the hostile diminutives of Southern U.S. 317.What Wild Up unearths on Julius Eastman, Vol. The Horizon Leans Forward., compiled and edited by Erik Kar Jun Leung, GIA Publications, 2021, p.If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? (1977). ![]() Please note that many of his works (not listed here) have deliberately provocative titles. Most of Eastman's works are open score and can be performed by any ensemble of similar instruments or voices. "The brazen and brilliant music of Julius mands attention: wild, grand, delirious, demonic, an uncontainable personality surging into sound," writes Alex Ross for The New Yorker. In the years since, there has been a steady increase in attention paid to his music and life, punctuated by newly found recordings and manuscripts, the publication of Gay Guerrilla, a comprehensive volume of biographical essays and analysis, worldwide performances and new arrangements of his surviving works, and newfound interest from choreographers, scholars, educators, and journalists. ![]() He left behind few scores and recordings, and his music lay dormant for decades until a three-CD set of his compositions was issued in 2005 by New World Records. "Eastman is something of a cult figure among composers and singers," reads a 1980 press release.ĭespite his prominence in the artistic and musical community in New York, Eastman died homeless and alone in a Buffalo, New York, hospital, his death unreported until eight months later, in a Village Voice obituary by Kyle Gann. He was not only a prominent member of New York's downtown scene as a composer, conductor, singer, pianist, and choreographer, but also performed at Lincoln Center with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, and recorded experimental disco with producer Arthur Russell. Julius Eastman was an artist who, as a gay black man, aspired to live those roles to the fullest. Julius Eastman (27 October 1940, New York –, Buffalo, N.Y,) was an American musician and artist.
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