Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music

Composer-performer Julius Eastman (1940-90) was an enigma, both comfortable and uncomfortable in the many worlds he inhabited: black, white, gay, straight, classical music, disco, academia, and downtown New York. His music, insistent and straightforward, resists labels and seethes with a tension that resonates with musicians, scholars, and audiences today. Eastman's provocative titles, including Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and others, assault us with his obsessions.
Eastman tested limits with his political aggressiveness, as reflected in legendary scandals like his June 1975 performance of John Cage's Song Books, which featured homoerotic interjections, and the uproar over his titles at Northwestern University. These episodes are examples of Eastman's persistence in pushing the limits of the acceptable in the highly charged arenas of sexual and civil rights.
In addition to analyses of Eastman's music, the essays in Gay Guerrilla provide background on his remarkable life history and the era's social landscape. The book presents an authentic portrait of a notable American artist thatis compelling reading for the general reader as well as scholars interested in twentieth-century American music, American studies, gay rights, and civil rights.
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Renée Levine Packer's book This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music inBuffalo received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence. Mary Jane Leach is a composer and freelance writer, currently writing music and theatre criticism for the Albany Times-Union.
Table of Contents
Foreword by George E. Lewis
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Julius Eastman and His Music - Renee Levine Packer
Julius Eastman, A Biography - Renee Levine Packer
Unjust Malaise - David Borden
The Julius Eastman Parables - R. Nemo Hill
Julius Eastman and the Conception of "Organic Music" - Kyle Gann
Julius Eastman Singing - John Patrick Thomas
An Accidental Musicologist Passes the Torch - Mary Jane Leach
A Flexible Musical Identity: Julius Eastman in New York City, 1976-90 - Ryan Dohoney
Evil Nigger: A Piece for Multiple Instruments of the Same Type by Julius Eastman (1979), with Performance Instructions by Joseph Kubera - David Borden
A Postminimalist Analysis of Julius Eastman's Crazy Nigger - Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek
"The Piece Does Not Exist without Julius": Still Staying on Stay On It - Matthew Mendez
Connecting the Dots - Mary Jane Leach
Gay Guerrilla: A Minimalist Choralphantasie - Luciano Chessa
Appendix: Julius Eastman Compositions - Mary Jane Leach
Chronology
Selected Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index