Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman, Vol. 5
Works by Julius Eastman
Wild Up, Julius Eastman, Christopher Rountree
New Amsterdam Records NWAM207 24:70 mins
If you visited a gym during the mid-2000s, you might have been encouraged to use a power plate – a device that sent vibrations through your stationary body, the new millennium’s push for the burn.
Julius Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla is the musical equivalent: micro-oscillations crest and fracture; phrases splinter, bloom, dissolve and reform.
New users to power plates are advised to start with short intervals and build up resilience. The same might be said for Gay Guerrilla. As with Eastman’s works for ‘multiples’, it's scored for any number of similar instruments (Jessie Montgomery has arranged a version for strings).
In this, the fifth instalment in a decade-long compendium of Eastman recordings – including Femenine (Vol 1) and The Holy Presence (Vol 4) – Wild Up combine strings, woodwind and percussion with flashes of brass. It’s a deviation, but Eastman was never one to stick to rules, even his own.
Before the premiere of this work in 1980, given as part of a composer-residency at Illinois’ Northwestern University, Eastman told his audience, ‘There aren’t many gay guerrillas. I don’t feel that “gaydom” has – does have – that strength, so therefore, I use that word in the hopes that they will.’ (Other works premiered that evening have similarly controversial titles; when Eastman was BBC Music’s Composer of the Month in 2021 they were deemed unprintable.)
Wild Up use their broad timbral palette with sensitivity; the thicker texture of ‘The Lessing is Miracle’ builds to an ecstatic intensity, as here – and in the ‘Dies Irae’ – Eastman invokes a Lutheran battle cry for equality, one that, some 36 years after the composer’s death, has been taken to heart by many modern listeners.
Wild Up bring a
sensitive approach to Eastman's music. Pic: Michael Leviton
