![]() ![]() “The music I heard was amazing, but the fact that there was more to be heard - can we find it?” said Hurt. With the help of a grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Hurt is trying to cobble together enough finished scores to fill out a longer festival of Eastman’s work. ![]() Eastman was viewed controversially, even by John Cage and other gay pianists in his time. The Friday night concert is a taste of what might come later. For example, during one of his apexes, Eastman recomposed Martin Luther’s hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, as a gay manifesto. Every piece has its own notation system.” “As far as we can tell, it’s peculiar to every piece. “He used nontraditional notation,” said Hurt. The multilayered, sometimes redundant cycles of repeated notes build into a wall-of-sound effect that cannot be picked apart. He discovered that many pianists who played with Eastman had saved their scores after the performance.Ī few recordings exist, but the nature of the music makes transcribing the recordings into sheet music impossible. Only fragments of written scores exist.ĭustin Hurt of Bowerbird, a new music presenting organization, has been digging up those fragments and piecing them together. Now, very few of his works can be performed, because nobody knows how to play them. Eastman tested limits with his political aggressiveness, as reflected in legendary scandals like his June 1975 performance of John Cages Song Books, which featured homoerotic interjections, and the uproar over his titles at Northwestern University. He had so alienated himself from his downtown colleagues that eight months passed before his obituary appeared in the Village Voice. He was homeless, living in Tompkins Square Park, and ultimately died alone in a hospital at age 49. All his musical scores were seized by the sheriff and thrown away. Through a series of unfortunate events, involving both bad luck and bad decisions, Eastman was evicted from his apartment in New York. It starts with four pianists on four pianos, culminating with 24 hands: three players per piano. He was much better at explaining it than I am.” “He made references to the basicness of the experience of being a slave, being a people on whose back the country was built. “He took that term to mean ‘That which is fundamental,’ to use his words,” said Kubera. One of the most provocatively titled, including the N-word, is an hour-long piece written for four pianos, will be performed at the Rotunda in West Philadelphia. Illustration by Jeff stberg Classical Music January 22. The titles of his minimalist pieces paint him as a provocateur. Avant-Garde Pioneer The New Yorker Julius Eastman, who died homeless, at the age of forty-nine, wrote political post-minimalist music. WHYY thanks our sponsors - become a WHYY sponsorĮastman composing (Photo by Donald Burkhardt)
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