Julius Eastman

Julius Eastman (1940–1990) was a com­poser, conductor, singer, pianist, and cho­reo­grapher. A singular figure in New York City’s downtown scene of the 1970s and ’80s, he also performed at Lincoln Center with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philhar­monic and recorded music by Mor­ton Feld­man, Arthur Russell, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Meredith Monk. “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest,” he said in 1976. “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”

Eastman was young, gay, and Black at a time when it was even more difficult to be young, gay, and Black. He swerved through academia, discos, Europe, Carnegie Hall, and the downtown experimental music scene. And in 1990, at age 49, Eastman died in Buffalo, New York, less than a decade after the New York City Sheriff’s Depart­ment threw most of his scores, belongings, and ephemera into the East Village snow.

Eastman’s music shines like a retroactive beacon to contemporary musical creators. Any term used to characterize today’s musical landscape—“genre-fluid” or the like—was anticipated by Eastman decades before. Yet, he was punished for being ahead of his time, both in the treatment of his music and, tragically, his person. Eastman’s music flowed freely from—and through—his myriad influences and was terribly served by the musical infrastructure of his day. In Wild Up’s unique approaches to Eastman’s work, the group is pushing itself to work in dialogue with the composer’s creative impulses, channeling his indi­vidu­al­istic spirit, aug­ment­ing the pieces with its ideas and concepts, and trying to stay true.