Now Celebrated, Julius Eastman’s Music Points to a New Canon

For a stretch of that performance, I longed for a recording of this “Buddha” and Richard Vallitt took on Eastman’s fully composed and fully notated “Piano 2” Saturday afternoon set I did the same thing with He gave Eastman’s chunky melodies, sprinkled between his hands in syncopated passages, the appropriate rigor in his system. But he also had a sense of theatrical swagger when he encountered a nimble line moving forward with parallel thrusts, an otherwise superior work by Eastman’s contemporary Joseph Kubera. It’s a quality you won’t find in standard recordings.

And as the metaphorical curtain was about to fall on Saturday, I began to think of Eastman concerts I had yet to hear. I came. As it was in the kitchen of the festival Julius Eastman: It’s Basics in 2018, so was the case at 92nd Street Y. But now that larger institutions have turned their attention to Eastman, it’s time to turn curators’ attention to the broader context in which he worked.

During his time, Eastman was a rare black artist among otherwise mostly white classical avant-garde artists. As noted in the foreword to The Gay Guerrilla, a collection of scholarly essays edited by that’s all one. Benjamin Patterson was part of Fluxus. Petr, who played Eastman’s music and counted him as a member in the 1970s. Muhal, the association’s founder, Richard He also worked with Abrams. Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Waddada Leo Smith. (Frighteningly, Braxton’s 75th birthday passed in 2020 without a proper New York City retrospective, even after pandemic restrictions on performances were lifted.)

What will the Eastman Festival sound like with so many artists still alive? They write fully notated pieces like ‘Piano 2’ and improvisational conceptual pieces like ‘Buddha’.

The problem is still one of the committed resources. Last season, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra performed Eastman’s recently reconstructed Symphony No. 2 during Black History Month. But there is no sign of recording. As of now, only one minute of his performance is available on his YouTube. What prevents American orchestras from taking Braxton and Mitchell’s music more widely?

92nd Street Y has a role to play in this too. And the widespread success of Eastman Festival with Wild Up should encourage it to continue on a similar path. That way, besides the small problem of putting on an exciting show, it would avoid the future problem of classical music needing to belatedly celebrate other American composers who died without much recognition. may also help.