Gay Guerrilla by Renée Levine Packer

Author:Renée Levine Packer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782046776
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Group Ltd

Notes

1.Julius Eastman, Unjust Malaise, New World Records CD 80638, 2005.

2.Peter Maxwell Davies, Eight Songs for a Mad King, The Fires of London, Julius Eastman, baritone, Peter Maxwell Davies conducting, Unicorn-Kanchana CD DKP 9052.

3.Constantine Cavafy, The Complete Poems of Cavafy, trans. Rae Dalven (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961).

CHAPTER SIX

* * *

AN ACCIDENTAL MUSICOLOGIST PASSES THE TORCH

* * *

Mary Jane Leach

It all began in 1998, when I tried to find The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc (Joan), a piece for ten cellos, by Julius Eastman. What started off as a simple search for one composition, gradually broadened into a search for all of Eastman’s music, one that continues to this day. Initially I didn’t think of this as performing musicological research—I was just trying to find pieces by a composer whose music I liked. As the years have passed, though, what I once considered to be a simple search fueled by stubbornness, has turned out to be an important act of musicology—recovering music once thought hopelessly lost.

I met Eastman in early 1981. We were both hired to be vocalists in a theater piece by Jim Neu, for which Hugh Levick was writing the music.1 At the first rehearsal, at 10 A.M., Eastman breezed in, dressed in black leather and chains, drinking scotch! That was my introduction to the outrageousness of Julius Eastman. Soon after this meeting, I attended the premiere of Joan, at The Kitchen in New York.2 Its energy and sound left a big impression on me.

In the fall of 1998, I was asked to teach a course in composition at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts), for “real” instruments (i.e., acoustic instruments), since many of its courses focused on electronic and computer music. I thought an interesting approach would be to focus on music written for multiples—pieces composed for four or more of the same instrument—as a concentrated way for students to absorb the character and sound qualities of each instrument. One piece that I wanted to include was Eastman’s Joan.

Shortly after trying to find a recording of Joan, I learned that composer Lois V Vierk had a tape of it, but when she went to make a copy for me, she found the cassette box empty, the cassette left in some unknown tape machine. This was the first of many obstacles that I was to encounter while trying to find Eastman’s music. Vierk put me in touch with C. Bryan Rulon, who had originally given her the copy of Joan, made from a cassette that Eastman had given him. While Rulon was making a copy for me, we talked about Eastman’s music and life, and that was when I learned that much of his music had been lost.3

I now had a tape of Joan, but I wanted to have the score as well, since it would be very useful for the students to see it. Pieces for multiples are much more complicated aurally than they appear to be on the page, due to the many

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