Reading, Listening, & Blog

Listen to minimalist music this week. We will start the next class with the following question: “What characterizes minimalism?”

Listen or watch to Julius Eastman’s minimalist piece “Gay Guerilla” from 1980.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-8_EIaHUg4 Links to an external site.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrne4Hr6jIs Links to an external site.

The work is 30-minutes long, with a remarkable surprise two thirds through (. . . you will hear “A Mighty Fortress is Our God”). What does this piece mean? Can you read it as a text (a conceptually different process from deciphering and decoding)? How does it speak to you? What does it tell you? Here is an example of musical witnessing, I think.

And speaking of witnessing, we have a mystery to consider: what’s up with the title? If this is an activist piece (and since there are no words, who’s to say) why use the language of minimalism, which employs as an aesthetic principle the rejection of excessive displays of subjectivity. In my reading, the author is there and not there –as soon as I locate him, he seems to disappear (purposefully?). How do you understand the politics of this piece?

Research Julius Eastman’s life. You will quickly learn that he was black, gay, and died homeless in 1990 at the age of 50, probably from AIDS. You will learn that he was an inventor, creating the language of minimalism alongside Steve Reich and Philip Glass, though neglected, overshadowed, pushed aside, erased. Most of his compositions were lost or destroyed. Some people say that his landlord threw away his remaining music when he was evicted from his apartment shortly before he died.

Find more of his music and listen to it. Compare his music to Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Now, don’t forget that Eastman was not a contemporary of Glass and Reich, but a peer and fellow innovator.

Remember Louis Bergonzi’s article from 5025 who wrote, “Whether you agree with this viewpoint about the relationship between a composer’s life and her or his music, consider what a hetero-exclusive approach to musical information about music and musicians might mean to them and how it would benefit your students, both gay and straight.” This of course goes to matters of race, too. It matters that lives that were once erased or made partial are given the fullness and humanity they deserve. According to the Buffalo Evening News in 1976, Eastman described his personal motto as “to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.” Building upon this idea, we may also say that, by making others more complete, we become larger too.

Finally, read this wonderful short essay by female/feminist Sci-fi pioneer Ursula Le Guin (look her up, too) about speaking with father tongues, mother tongues, and native tongues. I think Julius Eastman achieved the rare feat of speaking knowingly with all three, arriving at his own distinct voice as an artist.

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