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

At last, it no longer feels accurate to describe the music of Julius Eastman as “long lost.”

We’re firmly enjoying some new period of appreciation for the pioneering but once-overlooked work of this Black queer composer and multi-instrumentalist; archival recordings and new interpretations are widely available, and the art world more broadly has taken an enthusiastic interest in him. And at the 92nd Street Y, New York, this weekend, Eastman was celebrated with a three-concert series by the ensemble Wild Up, called “Radical Adornment.”

The first two programs, both of which were well attended, presented works that, in recent years, have re-emerged as pillars of the American Minimalist repertoire. Friday’s show offered the evening-length “Femenine” — gentle at the outset, then thundering (if overamplified) as conducted by an energetic Christopher Rountree. And on Saturday afternoon, the rollicking, pop-aware “Stay On It” received a luxurious, 20-minute reading that was even better than on Wild Up’s recording of the piece.

These concerts capitalized on Wild Up’s devoted attention to the Eastman catalog, which so far has included two portrait albums released on the New Amsterdam label. (A third volume, also excellent, is due for release in June, and a total of seven are planned.)

As if to note that there is still work to be done in the Eastman revival, Wild Up spent Saturday evening performing an immersive, five-hour take on “Buddha” — an enigmatic piece built from spare melodic lines, written out within an egg-shaped oval that Eastman drew around the margins of a one-page score. Like “Femenine” and other works, it invites interpretive choices and improvisation; and by now, this group expertly responds to such calls.

As you might expect, that meditative “Buddha” finale was the most sparsely attended of the three events. By the end — precisely at midnight — the audience had thinned out to only a handful of attendees, some of whom were musicians who had played in earlier shifts of the relay-style performance.

Yet this marathon set also thrillingly shone a spotlight on the players who had done so much to make the prior concerts, and Wild Up’s recent recordings, so captivating. And it corrected some of the concerns I had had about amplification issues during “Femenine.” I had left that Friday show thinking that I hadn’t heard enough of the saxophonist Shelley Washington — in part because of the heavy prominence of electric keyboard in the amplified mix — but “Buddha” offered a form of redress. Specifically, I cherished the chance to hear her supple approach in moments of mellow melody as well as in passages of forceful group exultation.

Elsewhere, the violist Mona Tian — an expert in the string quartet music of Wadada Leo Smith — was liable to place a dollop of edgy timbre or rhythmic pulsations into the dronescape whenever things threatened to go slack. And crucial to the opening hours of “Buddha” were the saxophonists Erin Rogers and Patrick Shiroishi. Rogers’s own music is often hyper urgent and fast-acting, but in the relaxed time scale of this performance, she savored every extended-technique tool in her embouchure. Shiroishi led fiery episodes and often grinned while listening to Rogers’s solo playing.

For stretches of that performance, I longed for a recording of this “Buddha,” and had a similar sensation during the Saturday afternoon set, when Richard Valitutto took on Eastman’s through-composed, fully notated “Piano 2.” He gave the proper sternness to Eastman’s thick systems of melody, strewn between the hands in syncopated passages. But he also had a theatrical sense of swagger when encountering jaunty lines that press forward with parallel thrust — a quality not as present on an otherwise excellent recording of the work by Joseph Kubera, a contemporary of Eastman’s.

And as the metaphorical curtain was coming down on Saturday, I started thinking about the kinds of Eastman concerts I have yet to hear. Up until now, the focus has reasonably been on simply presenting his music. That was the case at the 92nd Street Y, as it was in 2018 at the Kitchen for the festival “Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental.” But now that bigger institutions have taken notice of Eastman, it is time to turn curatorial attention to the broader context in which he worked.

In his time, Eastman was a rare Black artist in the otherwise mostly white classical avant-garde. But as George E. Lewis noted in his forward to the scholarly essay collection “Gay Guerrilla,” edited by Mary Jane Leach and Renée Levine Packer, Eastman was not the only one. Benjamin Patterson was a part of Fluxus. Petr Kotik’s S.E.M. Ensemble, which played music by Eastman and counted him as a member in the 1970s, also worked with Muhal Richard Abrams, a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the collective that also nurtured composers like Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill and Wadada Leo Smith. (Gallingly, Braxton’s 75th birthday passed in 2020 without an appropriate New York City retrospective, even after pandemic restrictions on performances were lifted.)

What would an Eastman festival sound like that also included the works of all those artists, many of whom are still alive? They have written fully notated works like “Piano 2” and improvisatory, conceptual pieces like “Buddha.”

The problem, as ever, is one of committed resources. Last season, the New York Philharmonic played Eastman’s recently reconstructed Symphony No. 2 during Black History Month. But there is no sign of a recording; for now, just a minute of that performance lives on YouTube. And what is stopping American orchestras from broadly taking up the music of Braxton and Mitchell while those artists are still around?

The 92nd Street Y has a role to play in this as well. And the broad success of its Eastman festival with Wild Up should encourage it to continue along a similar path. That way, in addition to the small matter of putting on exciting shows, it might also help classical music avoid the future problem of needing to belatedly celebrate other American composers who died with too little recognition.