Seventy Minutes

It’s not jazz. At least not as I would usually define it. It’s all in one key. There are no chord changes, no sliding away into dissonance and distraction. It is improvised, but the composer’s original theme, his “prime” motive, is ever-present. It reminds me of the way I experience Mount Hood as a Portlander. Coming in and out of view, sometimes distant, sometimes close enough to touch. But even when obscured, its presence grounds me in the territory that I occupy.

There is a published score for Julius Eastman’s 1974 work Femenine. I've been using it to learn the piece. There is also his original manuscript, of which I have a photocopy — four pages of barely legible scrawl containing scraps of notation and hand-written instructions for how the musicians are to navigate the next 70 minutes of communal music-making.

Photo by Donald Burkhardt

I’ve listened to five different versions of this piece over the past weeks. Aside from that opening musical motive, and the sleigh bells that ring throughout, each group seems to take a different approach to the work. My first impression on hearing Julius’ own performance of Femenine was of spellbinding humanity. I found myself deeply moved by the ensemble's willingness to fully inhabit a single idea, and to let the passage of time reveal secrets that the hustle and bustle of complex harmony would never uncover. Other performances were quite different. Some were more reflective, some more bombastic. Some engaged only with Eastman’s ideas, while others added several of their own.

Maybe this was Julius’ intention — to provide a recipe, not a manual. But despite the freedom with which his piece presents me, I find myself looking up newspaper clippings, interviews, and the recent spate of scholarly articles surrounding his “re-discovery” to better understand how to approach performing it.

It is possible that my European classical training is what pulls me back toward those four pages to mine for “musical truth.” Or maybe it's my desire not to lapse into my usual jazz vocabulary when faced with a piece of this length. But I think it is more than that. This man, who was by all accounts remarkable — a brilliant classical pianist, vocalist, pioneer of what he called “organic music,” who worked with Boulez and Meredith Monk, and died at 49 in a Buffalo hospital — was Black like me. He could have been my older brother. Maybe our paths even intersected in New York after I moved there from grad school in 1986 and he was homeless in Tompkins Square Park. How does such brilliance end in tragedy? It happens all the time, I know, and I know some of the causes. But the music he left behind compels me to hold the question. To examine more deeply where he and I might intersect and, if possible, to reflect some of that in the performance of his work. As with any recipe, we can do all the research we like, but we can’t know the story until we make the dish.

I doubt there will be time in my experience of Femenine from the piano bench for ruminations about the life that Julius Eastman lived as a Black, gay man in the contemporary art world, or the challenges he faced in pursuit of his artistic vision, some of which led to his homelessness and early death. What I will keep in mind is a statement he made in a 1976 interview in the Buffalo Evening News: “what I’m trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest—Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, homosexual to the fullest.” That, and patience, deep breathing, and the willingness to be swept up in the current, while still remembering to marvel at the iridescent sparkle of each drop of water that carries us on its way.

That seems like a worthy way to spend seventy minutes.

Photo by Chris Rusniak

Tickets to the April 20, 2023 performance by 45th Parallel Universe can be purchased here.