Music Book Review: Gay Guerrilla, edited by Renee Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach

Gay Guerrilla: Julius Easton and His Music
edited by Renee Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach (Music 780.92 Eas)

Let’s talk a little about Julius Eastman, a composer and singer whose work has mostly languished in obscurity since his death in 1990. During his lifetime, he was known for his incredible voice, which was well captured on the 1971 Unicorn Records edition of Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Eight Songs For a Mad King.” The piece is a feature for a notoriously difficult solo baritone performer, full of extended techniques with a five-octave range. As a composer, Eastman was known as a bit of a provocateur in the east coast new music scenes of the 1970s and 80s. As interesting as his music was—and is—his choices of titles sometimes led to controversies, causing the titles of his works to be left off concert programs. Truth be told, he remains ahead of his time in that regard—we can’t say the names of several of his works on the radio or print them in a newspaper over 40 years after their composition, either.

But there is far more to the work of Julius Eastman than pure provocation, and what provocation there is embedded in his works seems very prescient toward contemporary discussions happening in the arts and sociopolitical circles. As a gay black man working in a mostly straight white environment and community, Eastman didn’t hide his struggles to find peace in a society that often seemed to reject him and those like him. As the decades have passed, and we continue to wrestle with these issues as a society, perhaps it’s no surprise that there is a resurgence in interest in Eastman’s music in the last decade, including performances, retrospective recordings, and now the first book that looks critically at his work: Gay Guerrilla: Julius Easton and His Music.

Gay Guerrilla is in the form of essays, many of which are written by musicians and educators who knew Eastman in some capacity during his career. After an excellent foreword by composer and trombone virtuoso George Lewis, we get a biographical sketch of Eastman’s early years, in which it becomes clear that he had unusual musical gifts from an early age. In his early professional life, he enjoyed the beginnings of musical success, like a Grammy nomination and an arts grant in 1973, while also experiencing racism after moving to a white neighborhood. These incidents started to come together in his work.

Later sections of the book focus on both personal recollections, some analysis of compositions, and tales of his work as a vocalist. I was particularly struck by music writer Kyle Gann’s section on the resurgence of interest in Eastman’s work. Having known him since the mid-1970s, Gann speaks knowingly of how “those of us who love Eastman’s music despaired that we would never hear it again. But thanks to the miracle of modern musicology, his music is back, recorded, and being played, and he has a place in history.”

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, by Michael Broyles or It’s Our Music, too: The Black Experience in Classical Music, by Earl Ofari Hutchinson.] [ Wikipedia page for Julius Eastman ]

Recommended by Scott S.
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