Julius Eastman

Featuring: Wild Up

This is the fifth chapter, and one of the most assured. Wild Up's long reckoning with the music of Julius Eastman arrives at Gay Guerrilla, the work Eastman composed at the close of the 1970s and regarded as the point where his politics and his sound became indivisible.

Eastman remains one of the singular figures of American experimentalism, an African American and openly gay composer who moved through the orbit of the Buffalo new music scene and the downtown minimalist world before dying destitute in 1990, his scores scattered and partly lost. The Los Angeles ensemble Wild Up, founded in 2010 by conductor Christopher Rountree, has spent the years since 2021 assembling a multi-volume anthology devoted to him, a project already marked by several Grammy nominations and released across these volumes by New Amsterdam Records. Gay Guerrilla stands among the most daring statements in that catalogue, a work that sanctifies queerness and imagines an actual revolution of gay liberation. Eastman framed his title at the 1980 premiere in terms of sacrifice and cause, hoping, as he put it, that he might be a guerrilla himself "if called upon to be one".

Eastman conceived Gay Guerrilla for four pianos. Here Wild Up opens it out to chamber-orchestra scale, threading the writing through strings, horns, reeds, and pianos without softening its force. Eastman's additive minimalism builds in long accretions, frenzied repetition tightening to a near-unbearable density before breaking into passages of melodic ecstasy, and at its center the Lutheran chorale A Mighty Fortress Is Our God rises up, queered and turned against its own history. The ensemble performs these idiosyncratic scores in a spirit that belongs to their creator rather than smoothing them into the concert repertoire.

The musicologist and composer Luciano Chessa has argued that this single work would be enough to secure Eastman a firm place in twentieth-century music. On the evidence of this reading, it is hard to disagree. Produced, recorded, and mixed by Lewis Pesacov, this is essential listening, and the most fully realised entry yet in one of the most important ongoing projects in contemporary music.