David Dalle
Thursday February 14th, 2019 with David Dalle
Julius Eastman Part I: "What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest--Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest"

"What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest--Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest" -Julius Eastman, 1976 Julius Eastman was an American composer, pianist, and singer who lived from 1940 to 1990. His life followed an incredible, tragic arc: from early achievement, graduating in 1963 from the exclusive Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia;through artistic and financial success as a composer, performer, and faculty member in Buffalo from 1968-1976; to his final years in New York City, starting in 1976 where initially his growing militancy about gay and black pride inspired some of his greatest works, but where he faced various personal and mental crises and ended his last years isolated, homeless, and dying alone. Today in Part I we will begin at the end: Julius Eastman's New York period. Despite the artistic and financial success Eastman had in Buffalo (though maybe not immediately apparent today, in the late 60's and 70's Buffalo was one of the hotbeds of new music in the United States, centered around the State University of Buffalo and its prestigious Creative Associates program), Julius Eastman was ultimately dissatisfied with his life there and wanted to make a splash on a larger canvass. In New York, he was known in the Downtown music scene and things started off with great promise. He obtained a position as co-curator/conductor for the Brooklyn Philharmonic's community outreach program, where he set up programs of Black and women composers. He continued performing in a wide range of concerts, but by the early 1980's his life turned down a more self-destructive path. Many of Eastman's friends and colleagues felt this was deliberate. He had left his job and according to poet R. Nemo Hill, who lived with Eastman at the time: "He wasn't getting work because he was a son of a bitch...he would lay down obstacles, making things difficult for people. Somehow, he felt that it was his mission. You could say that he martyred himself. It didn't even seem like a racial issue, since he did it so deliberately. To this day, I have never met anyone who was more an architect of his own fate". In 1981 he was evicted from his apartment and lost all of his possessions. Not that this mattered to Eastman, as he was completely unconcerned with material things and never complained. However, it is certain that a lot of his music was lost forever by this. The manuscript for one of the pieces we will hear today was rescued by a friend from this apartment, found on the closet floor buried in cat litter. Eastman spent the rest of the 80's living rough in Tompkins Square Park, homeless shelters, and for some brief periods with friends. He was abusing alcohol and drugs, though this did not completely prevent him from working and making deep impressions on people. Mary Jane Leach, a composer who has worked tirelessly to resurrect Eastman's music, met him in 1981 at a 10 a.m. rehearsal where they were both hired as vocalists. She says "he showed up in leather and chains and drinking scotch". Eastman's mother believes the final nail in the coffin for his deteriorating mental state came in 1984 when a position opened up in Cornell's music department in Eastman's hometown of Ithaca. He believed he was in line for the job and was distraught when it didn't come through. Information on Eastman's life became even more sporadic after 1984, having lost contact with his friends, lovers, colleagues, and family. He did find his way back to Buffalo in 1989, living in shelters, and he died there a year later on May 28th, 1990 in a hospital, at the age of 49. Most of his friends and colleagues did not learn of his death until months later, in 1991. His former lover R. Nemo Hill: "One might have wished that Julius could have found for himself a more Buddhistic middle way, rather than the awful majesty of that crown of thorns that, as goddamned fucking fate would have it, fit him like a glove. One might have wished for him that the text engraved in his very bones had not been The Imitation of Christ, but something more along the lines of the Imitation of Chuang-Tzu. And yet, to pity him?--that would seem an insult to a man of such strength, and I cannot find it in my heart to do so. Rather I shall exalt, and exult." We will hear 3 exceptional masterworks from his New York period, "Evil N*****" from 1979, "The Holy Presence of Joan D'Arc" from 1981, and "Gay Guerrilla" from 1980.