The Music of Julius Eastman at Old First Church

Last Sunday afternoon at Old First Church, there was a huge audience for a concert devoted to music by Julius Eastman, a black, gay composer who died homeless of a cardiac arrest at age 49 in Buffalo, New York in 1990. Eastman and his music were essentially forgotten and discarded until Mary Jane Leach, a friend and fellow composer, took up his cause. In a 2016 post from SUNY Buffalo where Eastman studied with Lukas Foss, they relate: "Spreading the word, starting in the late 1990s, that she was looking for Eastmania, she became a clearinghouse for information, bits of scores and audio, and in 2005 helped organize the first commercial release of his work, a gripping three-disc, three-hour set called “Unjust Malaise.” Since that time, live performances of his works have increased exponentially, creating something of a fad, which is fine because the music deserves the attention.

The first half of the program was stark and spare, with the bottomless bass Richard Mix singing the acapella Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, a repetitive and anguished plea to the saints for 13 minutes that was hypnotic. This was followed by a two-piano transcription of the 1982 Touch Him When with pianists Luciano Chessa and Regina Meyers, and then a short, beautiful acapella duet for Richard Mix and baritone Kevin Baum of the 1989 Our Father. The liturgical overtones fit perfectly into the Old First Church pulpit.

The concert was curated and organized by composer and musicologist Luciano Chessa, who I first encountered at a Sarah Cahill piano recital of Italian music at Old First Church in 2006, when he was still a young academic at UC Davis (above).

Besides his own compositions, Chessa has continued with a wide array of musical projects including a worldwide concert tour of "Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners." Most recently, he edited and conducted a world premiere of Eastman's Second Symphony last November with the Mannes Orchestra in New York's Alice Tully Hall which from all accounts was a resounding success.

The final piece on the first half of last Sunday's program was the 1984 Hail Mary where Regina Myers tinkled a simple tune on the piano while Luciano repeatedly recited the familiar prayer of Hail Mary, full of grace over a megaphone complete with intentional feedback. Some in the audience were mesmerized while others thought it interminable (put me somewhere in the middle). There are two very well-written reviews of the concert, by the way, by Joshua Kosman at SFGate and Tysen Dauer at SF Classical Voice.

During a brief break, four grand pianos were moved onto the stage side by side for the afternoon's major piece, the provocatively titled Crazy Nigger. For close to an hour, pianists Chris Brown, Regina Myers, D. Riley Nicholson, and Lucano Chessa pounded away and created huge waves of hallucinatory music that often sounded like an entire orchestra. I could have sworn there were hidden horns playing somewhere while other audience members heard cellos, string sections, woodwinds depending on their own ear-to-brain wiring. At certain moments, I thought I was in the middle of the more ecstatic sections of John Adams' Harmonielehre.

In a 2017 Alex Ross New Yorker article on Eastman, he wrote: "Classic minimalist works tend to introduce change by way of horizontal shifts: Reich’s “phasing” effect, in which instruments playing the same music slip out of synch with one another; Glass’s “additive” process, in which notes are added to a repeating pattern. Eastman’s method, by contrast, is vertical. He keeps piling on elements, so that an initially consonant texture turns discordant and competing rhythmic patterns build to a blur."

Ross continues: "Something about this music can’t be fixed in place, and recordings are a pale echo of the live experience. In the closing minutes of Crazy Nigger, additional pianists emerge from the audience and join the players onstage, to assist in the unfolding of a clangorous overtone series. The collapse of the wall between performers and onlookers feels like the start of an uprising." Just about everyone filed out of Old First Church last Sunday looking energized and stunned. (Thank you to Steve Susoyev who took the snaps from the balcony with his phone because I had forgotten my camera.)