When Julius Eastman died in Buffalo in 1990, he had virtually disappeared from musical life. His death went unnoticed for months and many of his scores and recordings were lost. Only with the release of Unjust Malaise in 2005 did his music come back into focus. Since then, Eastman has become one of the most intriguing rediscoveries in American music of the second half of the twentieth century.
Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was a pianist, singer, choreographer, conductor and performer, but all these roles ultimately seem to come together in his compositions, in which writing, improvising, performing and social commitment are barely separable. His music aligns with minimalism, but in Eastman's work, repetition takes on a much more physical, sometimes even explosive force. His so-called 'organic music' grows from small musical cells that repeat, accumulate and intensify into an increasingly powerful sonic whole. This is convincingly illustrated on this CD by the New European Ensemble under the direction of Emlyn Stam, featuring Joy Boy (1974), Gay Guerilla (1979) and Buddha (1983).
Eastman's scores do not specify everything. Within certain parameters, performers are given room to make choices regarding pitch, rhythm and instrumental arrangement. As a result, the same work can take on a strikingly different sound in different performances. This requires not only technical mastery, but especially a feel for the balance between freedom and structure. The New European Ensemble handles this convincingly. The sound is given space, without the underlying architecture ever disappearing from view.
Joy with a frayed edge
The CD opens with Joy Boy, which immediately makes clear that Eastman's music cannot be captured in the familiar image of minimal music as merely repetitive and meditative. Short, repeated tremolo-like movements get going, disappear and return transformed. What initially sounds almost playful gradually takes on something nervous and elusive.
That unease also resonates in a title that is anything but innocent. Joy evokes happiness, lightness and pleasure, while boy is a loaded term in American history with which black men were reduced to a subordinate position. In Eastman, a black homosexual composer who himself experienced social exclusion and stereotyping, this combination takes on an extra charge: Joy Boy brings joy and humiliation, playfulness and social tension uncomfortably close together. The music does not tell a literal story about this, but the title does color the listening experience: the energy never sounds entirely carefree, as if something continues to chafe behind the joy.
Precisely in this, Eastman shows his strength. He needs no grand gestures to build tension. Small musical events gain increasing weight through repetition and displacement. The initially loose movements seem to gradually become fixed in the sound, until they are no longer perceived as separate figures but as one growing tension. Joy Boy is thus more than an intriguing opening: it immediately sets the tone for a sound world in which seemingly simple patterns increasingly evoke underlying unease.
Silence that does not remain still
With Buddha, the character of the CD changes dramatically. Where Joy Boy pulls the listener into a nervous, accumulating motion, Buddha seems to withdraw from time. The sound becomes thinner, movement sparser, and between individual events emerge spaces where apparently little happens. Yet it is precisely there that listening becomes more intense.
That sense of openness is already contained in the curious form of the score. Eastman draws Buddha as an egg, which can be read both from left to right and in the opposite direction. A self-evident starting and ending point is thus absent. The performers are not given a charted route, but a musical space in which they determine during performance how the material unfolds. Long tones and short, pulsing interventions keep time constantly in motion. A tone can linger at the edge of hearing and through a small shift suddenly come to the fore. What seems still is continually changing.
Buddha is therefore not a comfortable invitation to meditation. For that, the music remains too tense and too unpredictable. A single pulse, a shift in tone color or the appearance of a new note can overturn the entire musical space. Eastman does not ask the listener to lean back, but to remain attentively present to what sounds and what happens between the sounds.
The New European Ensemble makes that vulnerability audible in small, almost unobtrusive details: a string player lets a tone fade slightly longer than expected; a silence lasts just long enough to be felt. Sounds seem to attract each other, repel each other and give each other space again, creating a kind of acoustic breathing. Therein lies the fascination of Buddha: silence gains no resting point, but its own movement. It shifts and holds the tension beneath the surface.
From minimal cell to wall of sound
Gay Guerilla is by now one of Eastman's best-known compositions and at the same time one of his most outspoken works. The title alone makes it clear that Eastman did not regard music as a neutral space. His compositions could claim identity, bring history back to memory and resist social exclusion.
Eastman described a guerrilla as someone willing to stake his life for a conviction. The title thereby acquires a pronounced political charge, but the music need not illustrate that meaning literally. It carries its fighting spirit in the way it unfolds. From extremely limited material, a process emerges that slowly but inexorably expands. One pattern is joined by a second, subsequently by a third, while the repetition increasingly forces itself upon the listener. What initially sounds almost bare gradually becomes increasingly difficult to evade.
Herein lies the particular strength of this work. Eastman has no need for a traditional climax: the music makes itself ever heavier. Sounds accumulate, rhythmic patterns become entangled and the space between individual events grows smaller. You hear not only a mass of sound emerging, but almost physically experience how it forms. Repetition becomes pressure, pressure becomes tension and eventually the music acquires its own gravity.
Only after about two-thirds of the work does it appear – as a long-delayed memory – the Lutheran chorale Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. The melody does not enter the music as a clear quotation from outside, but seems to slowly emerge from the built-up mass of sound. First there is recognition, then the melody increasingly gains hold on the soundscape. After all those minutes of accumulation, it suddenly offers a foothold, but at the same time it opens a new layer: religious memory, community, steadfastness and resistance. In combination with Eastman's title and his own position as a black homosexual artist, the chorale can moreover be read as more than a religious reference: it takes on a broader charge of identity, community and resistance.
That Gay Guerilla is heard here in Jessie Montgomery's arrangement for strings, whereas the work is usually performed by four pianos, is therefore more than a practical choice. The strings change the character of the mass of sound without compromising the fundamental power of Eastman's music. Their sound can stretch and continue to move, causing the patterns to interlock less angularly and more organically. The repetition takes on something physical: strings add layer upon layer until the sonic space is increasingly filled. When the chorale finally emerges from that mass, it does not feel like an inserted quotation, but like something that was present beneath the surface all along.
It is precisely here that the New European Ensemble makes an impression. The buildup is forced nowhere, making the appearance of the chorale all the more striking. Gay Guerilla ends not so much in a traditional climax as in a state in which the accumulated mass of sound has reached its full power.
A composer who refuses to be neutralized
Perhaps that is the greatest merit of this cd: the New European Ensemble presents Eastman not as a curiosity from the American avant-garde, but as a composer whose music is convincing in itself. The social and personal context is important, but ultimately the sound does the work. And that sound is refractory, vulnerable, nervous and sometimes overwhelming.
Joy Boy, Buddha and Gay Guerilla show three different sides of the same headstrong spirit. From nervous repetition and charged silence to a mass of sound that increasingly densifies: Eastman never seeks the easiest path. That background explains much of what is at stake in this music, but it is not a prerequisite for being moved by it: even those who know nothing of Eastman's life hear in these three works a composer who makes no compromises.
For those still discovering Eastman, this is a particularly strong introduction. Gay Guerilla forms the undisputed highlight, but it is precisely the combination with Joy Boy and Buddha that makes the recording convincing. At 47 minutes, the playing time for a physical cd is rather compact, but the three works do leave a strikingly concentrated impression.
Eastman's music does not lend itself to easy consumption. It slowly forces itself upon you and then does not let go.
