Status Updates From Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastm...

Eastman notoriously composed a whole ‘nigger’ series of works...There is no self-hatred in these title choices but, rather, self-empowerment: the titling was, among other things, a way of exercising power, a way of taking control over words and their meaning.

…if [‘Crazy Nigger’] had been titled ‘Four Pianos’ or ‘Music in Seventeen Parts’…academic language would make it profoundly easy to divorce it from its composer. Instead, the musicologist, the performer, and the listener must deal with Julius Eastman himself, or at least the conversation he wanted us to have. This is not a work for a committee to give an award to and then place onto a shelf.

His Stay On It of 1973 used repetition and the additive process in a way that Steve Reich and Philp Glass had made familiar, but it may have been the first minimalist piece to appropriate pop rhythms and harmonies…It is amazing to think that at that time Glass had not yet written Music in Twelve Parts nor Reich Music for Eighteen Musicians.

Another reading of the work may be as a manifestation of racial anger—Eastman’s comment on the status of blacks or gays in society. Similarly, seizure of the words ‘nigger’ and ‘faggot’ in the titles for his compositions, is an extension of this device—detoxification through insistent confrontation.

On the one hand, he was a highly regarded Grammy-nominated singer-actor in the United States and abroad; a faculty member at a major university; a respected composer-pianist in a prestigious musical ensemble and had...‘grown up in a white world’...on the other hand, he was constantly at risk for being demeaned as a black man or (as his brother termed it—the ‘double whammy’) as a gay black man.

The Kyle Gann essay is lovely. Respectful without trying to gild the lily or polish the turd. He actually engages with Eastman's music and legacy and exposes the reader to information that might help understand the work being performed by his music. He doesn't try to position himself as an expert but rather as someone who knew and appreciated him.

I've waited so long to read this, and no I don't even know if I can stand to finish it :/