Even now, excepting a recent chapter by Ellie M. Indeed, very little previous scholarship on Eastman exists: only in the last few years has that started to change.

1 Hisama Ellie M., “‘Diving into the earth’: the musical worlds of Julius Eastmann”, Bloechl Olivie, (.)Ģ Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music is the first book devoted to Eastman.

To become absorbed in his musical world is necessarily to wonder why Eastman gained insufficient recognition in his lifetime, and hence to consider bigger questions about the relationship between the musical and the socio-cultural: between musical styles, practices, production, promotion and reception, and identity, race and sexuality. To be both delighted by this music and troubled by the questions it provokes is surely the point. I wanted to work with my students on his music for multiple pianos, but how does a white, middle class English woman deal with presenting a piece called Crazy Nigger in the north of England in the early twenty-first century? How would this title be received, especially when audiences don’t know anything about the composer or his music? But Eastman knew what he was doing.

Both exciting and troubling in the challenges the music presents: challenges for both performing and listening, but also through some of Eastman’s titles.

Troubling, because it was hard to understand why I and many of my colleagues, whether performers, composers or musicologists, didn’t already know this music. Lewis has noted in his foreword to this volume, p. xv). Exciting, too, because of the striking differences to those better known minimalist works: the noticeable differences in the development of musical ideas, in the ways players determine progression through the work, and in the harmonic language with, by turns, striking explorations of the harmonic series, octotonic structures, and echoes of jazz harmonies – a more ‘ecstatic affect’ than contemporaneous minimalism (as George E. Exciting because this music grabbed me similarly, in certain respects, to now canonic minimalist pieces such as Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians : the emergence of rhythmic grooves from sustained repetitive pulsation, the endless overtonal variety from combined instrumental sonorities, the difference-within-repetition over a sustained timeframe, and the organic interdependency of harmony and rhythm all produce, for me, a deeply pleasurable intensity a subjective absorption in nuance emerging from an objectified, openly inviting process. 1 As someone who first became interested in ‘new’ music as a student in the late 1980s, and has continued playing, studying, writing about and teaching music by composers variously considered to be minimalist, postminimalist and experimental (amongst other denominations), my first encounter with the music of Julius Eastman, in 2012, was exciting but also troubling.

Eastman gay guerrilla