Concentration(s):
Music | Modern Culture and Media
Music Capstone Project:
Excess and Effacement: The Transgressive and Forgotten Music of Julius Eastman
Julius Eastman was a late-twentieth century composer whose work transcended genre, ranging from minimalism to avant-garde experimentalism to jazz. Eastman was Black and gay, and constantly negotiated the outsider status those identities conferred upon him as he attempted to get his work published and performed. After struggles with addiction and homelessness, Eastman died alone, aged just 49. His music went unrecognized and unperformed for several decades afterward, especially compared to his more renowned white contemporaries, such as John Cage and Morton Feldman. Drawing on the small body of existing scholarship on Eastman, as well as theoretical approaches from Black studies and queer theory, this essay takes up a conceptualization of excess as characteristic of Eastman’s life and work. Through analyses of three of Eastman’s pieces, I discuss how his wholesale erasure from the canon was a result of the unintelligibility of his life and work in the terms of the Western classical music tradition, an excess which enabled him to resist the capture of a canon mired in white supremacy and heteropatriarchy.
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