Review: Julius Eastman’s “Stay On It!” Presented by Jacaranda Music
Every so often, middlebrow legacy media will choose to frame a particular artist as a “rediscovery,” which has been evident in The New Yorker and The New York Times’s coverage of Julius Eastman over the past few years. A late-20th century composer typically associated with minimalism, but whose stronger stylistic allegiances arguably lie with Manhattan’s no wave scene, Eastman crafted music that drew, thematically, on identity politics and religion and, sonically, on classical atonalism, disco, and jazz. Eastman scholars and archivists have championed this widespread, renewed appreciation of the composer, though they’d cringe to read him described as a “recent emergence.” That’s how the website for Jacaranda Music — a classical music series and foundation based in Santa Monica — misguidedly described Eastman on their event-page, for a performance they hosted of his piece “Stay On It!” on April 13. It shows ignorance on Jacaranda’s part, though they’re not alone: This “rediscovery” narrative has plagued so many of the feature articles written on Eastman and the multitudes of recent concerts in which his work has been showcased.
For Jacaranda’s event, the student ticket price was $23, and with that I donated an extra $20 to pat myself on the back for supporting the arts. But while I was looking at the hefty sums from donors — one of the Getty kids/grandkids, the city of Santa Monica — listed on the back-page of the program notes, I realized that I could’ve been benevolent elsewhere and that $23 for a ticket (even if that was the regular price, rather than $45) was excessive. My excitement to hear “Stay On It!” live overrode these factors. Admittedly, I’m only familiar with the piece thanks to contemporary musicians who have “rediscovered” Eastman; a few years ago, the avant-rock band Horse Lords released their own version, which features the rapper Abdu Ali reciting Eastman’s original program notes. While Horse Lords’ interpretation is looser and funkier, the original is exacting and delicately spaces its pockets of silence; Eastman’s looseness and funkiness are implicit rather than palpable. The octet that performed the piece at Jacaranda did an excellent job at emphasizing these qualities. Seth Parker Woods balanced playing cello with his role as band leader, making sure the rest of the ensemble members seamlessly returned from freeform passages to the main phrase.
Well before the octet played “Stay On It!”, there was a shocking moment during an informal panel at the beginning of the concert discussing Eastman and the other composers featured that night. The panel was comprised of Woods, pianist Scott Dunn, and Eastman scholar Renee Levine Packer, moderated by Jacaranda’s artist director Patrick Scott. At first Scott’s pompous behavior seemed trivial — he wrote that evening’s program notes, which was basically an extended Wikipedia-type entry on minimalism, and then he claimed that serialism and minimalism were complete opposites of each other (nope that’s not true) — but then he did something that showed how his pomposity derives from insularity and insensitivity. Eastman frequently used the n-word in his composition titles to reclaim his racial identity and to shock the prudish old white men in classical music. Referencing one such title, Scott, a white guy, actually said the n-word out loud. And before he did so, he prefaced it with the phrase “Wait for it…” It seems he said this to brace Jacaranda’s almost entirely white audience so they wouldn’t be *shocked*, as if they needed to be coddled in the first place — and as if Scott even had a right to utter the word. Such a thoughtless decision shows that Jacaranda cared more about accruing cultural capital from “Stay On It!” than about respecting the composer’s identity. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the other avant-garde foundations around the country that’ve featured Eastman function the same.
