Greg’s Reviews > Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music > Status Update

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.

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.