Julius Eastman’s Femenine
(pre-concert talk, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, 25 August, 2023)
When I was coming up as an experimentally-minded composer-improviser, Julius Eastman was the quintessential cult figure. Everyone in my circle knew who he was—sort of. He was a Black queer artist that didn’t so much cross genre boundaries as make the very concept ‘genre’ obsolete and, frankly, a bit silly. He was a composer, virtuosic singer, pianist and keyboardist, dancer, conductor, improviser. He was connected perhaps foremost to some nebulous thing called ‘minimalist’ music, but a version steeped in experimental jazz and Black American popular music. He was a provocateur and could perhaps have been described as a civil rights activist. He was almost certainly most well-known for his stunning 1973 recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, which is still the definitive version of that remarkable work. He was associated with the groundbreaking SEM Ensemble in Buffalo, New York. He toured at one point with the similarly iconoclast Meredith Monk and performed on her 1981 album Dolmen Music—one of the very greatest recordings in the history of the medium, for my dollar. He played keyboards for the avant-disco band Dinosaur L., which we were listening to a moment ago, suggested that soup be served at his performances, and wrote compositions with deliberately confrontational titles, some of which are not my right to repeat.
I mentioned that the cool kids ‘sort of’ knew who Eastman was. The fact is, his own music was, to us, more myth than reality. That’s still the case, by the way: most of his scores and rehearsal tapes are lost forever, left on a Tompkins Square Park sidewalk by New York’s finest when Eastman was evicted from his apartment in the early 1980s. There are disparate stories about Eastman’s reaction to his eviction, which happened several years before his untimely death in 1990. There are likewise disparate stories about his physical and mental health during this period, which out of respect I choose not to speculate on. The fact is, we knew about Eastman much more than we knew his music in any meaningful way. It couldn’t have been otherwise: scores didn’t exist, recordings were but rumors: it was Mad King, Meredith Monk, the fabulously weird Dinosaur L., and stories.
What we are able to know now is because of the work of a handful of loving colleagues, most notably the composer Mary Jane Leach, who have worked tirelessly to find little snippets of firsthand accounts, scores or parts, news clippings, or any other information about Eastman’s life and work. Leach co-edited an outstanding book, Gay Guerrilla, named for one of Eastman’s chamber compositions. The book features contributions by a number of insightful musicologists, not least Eastman’s friend Kyle Gann, who was to write a posthumous obituary for Eastman in the Village Voice in 1990, and experimental musician and theorist George E. Lewis, who knew Eastman and wrote the volume’s Foreword. Mary Jane Leach also curates a website, which is a small treasure trove of archival work on Eastman. It is largely because of Leach’s work that we have Eastman’s hand-written score to Femenine, which is what we’re playing from this evening.
As I wrote in the program note, Femenine has seen a remarkable resurgence in recent years, with performances across the world, multiple recordings, and write-ups in such prestigious organs as The New Yorker and The Los Angeles Times. There have also been several recent recordings. I’m looking forward very much to listening to these, but have deliberately avoided doing so before this concert, so as not to influence my own interpretation of Eastman’s sometimes arcane performance directions.
I’d like to talk about Femenine’s recent reception history, because I think there are some important lessons to take away. First of all, Eastman’s composition is nearly always compared to those of two contemporaneous composers: Philip Glass and Steve Reich. I think there are some good reasons to make this comparison—especially the transversal connections each composer makes to DIY, ‘band’-oriented music-making. This, though, never seem never to be the reason cited in the journalistic literature I’ve been scouring. Instead, Eastman tends to be given the ‘noble savage’ treatment. He’s the autodidact genius. His music is rough and boisterous, emotionally dense and even a little magical. He ‘followed’ the minimalists’ ideas but ‘secularized’ them, stirring in the rough and tumble noise of the other-than-elitist Other. Glass and Reich were said to have done this too; they were, after, the downtown Other to the uptown funk of Milton Babbitt and Charles Wuorinen. But their Other-ness still needed to occupy a certain kind of austere parameter, and the ‘I’ word—improvisation—which John Cage performed incredible acrobatics to avoid ever using—was strictly antithetical to their compositional imaginations. Would that these accounts at least compare Eastman to LaMonte Young or John Cale or Yoko Ono: we might start to get somewhere!
But here’s my favorite—by which I mean my least favorite—take. Femenine was recently described as “an under-recognized modern masterpiece.” Eastman himself would absolutely have rejected that last word. He called his music ‘organic’ and described how it ‘attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that which is superficial’. Here are two early vignettes that support an anti-mastery reading of Eastman’s relation with musical sounds, musicians, and audiences.
Exhibit A: At an auspicious performance in Buffalo, New York in 1975, an ensemble that included Eastman at the piano performed Femenine in a gallery space in the Albright Knox Museum of Art. A second ensemble simultaneously played Eastman’s composition Masculine outside, and attendees were invited to move between the two spaces as they pleased. The nomadic movement was a crucial and deeply powerful deconstructive gesture: an hour-plus of living in the liminal space between masculine and feminine; moreover, an invitation from the very person curating the event to do so! From this perspective, we might ask: was Femenine even meant to be listened to as an autonomous musical work, much less something that a generation and a half later could be deemed a masterpiece?
Exhibit B: A contemporaneous performance in Glasgow of Eastman’s 1973 composition Stay On It, about which many commentators have observed the introduction of jazz or Black popular music syncopations into the kinds of repetitive, process-driven textures that they (the commentators) found akin, once again, to composers like Reich and Glass. But Eastman’s musical focus was very different from these composers, much more akin, perhaps, to the politically-valent, collectivist 1970s works of Cornelius Cardew or, more importantly, Sun Ra.
In a talk he gave before the Glasgow concert, Eastman downplayed the importance of the notes in his score and foregrounded what he described as “the musicians’ innate musical abilities” as well as his desire “to bring the beat back into music.” (There’s also a flippant reference to “so-called serious music” in his talk that very effectively distances what Eastman was working on from the new-composed-music vanguard.)
In making these points he was aligning aesthetically and—almost certainly—politically with activist streams in contemporaneous music: more Fela Kuti than Morton Feldman. There are many aspects of Femenine that bear witness to the idea that we should be treating Eastman’s music as a conduit to the most radical Black music of its time. I’ll mention just one now: the appearance about 3/4 of the way through Femenine of what he calls “Mao melodies,” a series of descending pentatonic motifs that repeat for several minutes. Journalist Alex Ross write in the New Yorker that “no one is quite sure what to make of” Eastman’s label, but that is almost certainly due to Ross’s deafness to the multilayered connections between Maoist political philosophy and that of the Black Panther Party in the US, as exemplified by political leaders like Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis and musicians like Fred Ho and Cal Massey.
I can’t stress enough how important these ideas are for understanding Eastman’s music. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of the ‘fierce urgency of now’, which has been described as animating John Coltrane’s and Albert Ayler’s and Archie Shepp’s musical expressions. The connection between Eastman and these avant-jazz pioneers remains to be explored. One important line: while Shepp’s music especially was overtly linked to Black civil rights, Eastman’s activism was intersectional and maximalist: ‘Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest’, he described in a 1976 interview.
The Buffalo performance took place about six months after Eastman recorded Femenine in Albany, New York. That recording was released by Frozen Reeds in 2022, and it is a stunning document of a special performance. As journalist Leo Chadburne writes in Frieze magazine, the performance “has the euphoric, rhythmic quality of early works by Terry Riley and Steve Reich, but the volatile sound-world and labyrinthine structure are all Eastman’s own.” Another commentatory refers to the work as “densely associative,” built around a “malleable groove”—which should remind us of Eastman’s own words around the importance of the beat.
The beat in Black music—from Africa through the entirety of the diaspora—is the locus of expressive energy, the ‘urgent now’ through which transformative action is made possible. I’ve written about malleability, association, and collective expression in the music of another Black queer composer-improviser, Cecil Taylor, framing temporality in Taylor’s music as a form of ‘queer rhythm’. I think this concept applies to Eastman as well, but that’s a subject for future research. But the short version goes like this:
The beat is expansive and always in motion. The first sounds you’ll hear in a few minutes are prerecorded sleigh bells, which persist through the performance. They’re not quite in sync—they cannot be—so there’s a kind of respirational quality to how they unfold in time. The main motivic idea then enters, which as I describe in the program note has three components. It begins with urgency, moves through a playful syncopated oscillation, and settles into an atemporal transcendence. From this emerge all sorts of temporal shifts, motivic developments and superimpositions, and intensely expressive redirections of musical ideas. Some of these transformations are built into Eastman’s sometimes arcane score directions, which have stimulated much deliberation during our rehearsals! Others flow from the score as prompts for individual musicians to explore and grow their own relational capacities.
This leads me, then, to one more little vignette. In a commentary on the 1975 Buffalo performance in Fifth Freedom: Newsletter of the Niagara Frontier Gay Community, journalist John Yansom observes how
The juxtaposition of … themes seemed such that there was no time when there was a repetition of the same relationships…. Instead of progression and variations of themes prearranged by the composer, chance was given a free hand providing spontaneous and unplanned variations of sound.
According to Joe Ford, a saxophonist who performed with Eastman during this period, these variations were built to an extent into the compositional design, with “skeletal versions of rhythmic-melodic figures to be expanded upon in performance.” Another commentatory, Jaime Rosal, suggested that Eastman’s ambition was “to free the interpreters from the slavery of the written score.” This is a crucial point, which underscores George E. Lewis’s trenchant distinction between what he calls “Eurological” and “Afrological” forms of musical experimentation. The latter, again, aligns irreducibly with a liberation politics that refuses the possibility that music can be a “pure” art form, art for art’s sake.
Leo Chadburn suggests that “We ignore marginalized and minority voices like [Eastman’s] at our peril.” That seems like a good place for me to stop talking and for all of us to enter into the liminal, libidinal world of Femenine.
Program note
After several decades of silence, Julius Eastman’s 1974 composition Femenine has seen a remarkable resurgence in recent years, with performances across the world, multiple recordings, and write-ups in such prestigious organs as The New Yorker and The Los Angeles Times. Like all of Eastman’s music that we have any sort of access to, Femenine is a deeply personal expression, not only of the composer’s voice (Eastman, a thoroughly iconoclast Black gay composer and a stunningly virtuoso and fiercely individual performer, embodied all at once a confrontational activism, tender introspection, and wily humor) but also of his musical interlocutors, the members of his ensemble that he empowered to contribute in creative ways to the shaping of a given performance. A question, then, that haunts any performance of Eastman’s music is how to even do so without the composer himself present. As one commentator has recently written:
“To revive a piece like Femenine, in which oral transmission will remain much more important than any score, can be seen as a sort of violation of the spirit of his music. But the only alternative would have been silence and oblivion.”
Eastman’s music was subject to silence and, possibly, oblivion for two decades following his untimely death in 1990. But it is clear that this music needs to be heard, and needs to be heard live, with all the manifold contingencies that only live performance can afford. The music—which, to be sure, demands as much of listeners as it does of performers—grows organically from the simplest of source material, a many-times repeated vibraphone gesture that begins with urgency, moves through a playful syncopated oscillation, and settles into an atemporal transcendence. This sets the scene, from which emerges all number of temporal shifts, motivic developments and superimpositions, and intensely expressive redirections of musical ideas, invoking a complex world where meaning refuses to be fixed, where contradictions abound, and where no interpretation is impossible. As another Black queer activist musician once wrote,
Reality has touched against myth
Humanity can move to achieve the impossible
Because when you achieved one impossible the others
Come together to be with their brother…
(Sun Ra, “Reality Has Touched Against Myth,” 1969)