In spring 2020, lockdown changed the way I listened, on both a physical and psychological level. I was doing the occasional album review for a popular music site. One of the edits I received was to “avoid explicit references to the pandemic or social distancing,” lest every review left an imprint of the global event on music that was made long before Covid hit.
I got it, but I didn’t get it. Music is a meeting place between musician and listener. It is impossible to listen in a vacuum. In Judith Becker’s book Deep Listeners (2004), she argues that our perceptions of music are shaped by the place, time, and cultural contexts we exist within, as much as the specifics of our personal life experiences.
Or as Jack Halberstam wrote in the forward to The Undercommons (2013) by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: “When we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening.”
This is the first in a slow series of blogs that attempt to explore these understandings about listening, which relate in various ways to the themes of a book I’m working on, also called Signals From Beyond.
My baby turned one last month. The end of his first journey around the sun and the beginning of the next. Parenting, I have discovered, also has a circular flow. It's always playtime, mealtime, or nap-time, on rotation until bed. The repetitions of one day shape the curve of the next. For most of my life, the idea of having a kid represented the act of submitting to the restrictions of routine — or rather, someone else's routine. I associated this in-service routine with fixity and I wanted to feel free. It wasn't until middle age reared its head that my feelings about having a child became less fixed, as did my sense of self. Parenting is teaching me that routine is never routine. That repetition can birth digression. That change really is the only constant. I hope my baby will always love dancing though. He bobs up and down to any and all rhythms that reach his ears. Be it the clockwork clatter of a subway train on the tracks above the playground or the records I play in our apartment to hold us as we cycle through our daily circling.
The one I keep reaching for at the moment was a recent-ish gift from my friend and favorite editor Rawiya, who I miss working with every day. A double LP — four sides, four circles — that contains a live recording of a 1974 performance of New York composer Julius Eastman's Femenine by the S.E.M. Ensemble, with Eastman on piano. The musical time-space of the performance is held by mechanized sleigh bells that shake at such a pace they become an endless shhh, like the sound I whisper to my baby to soothe him, which works because it mimics the whoosh of blood rushing from the heart to nourish the womb. I wonder if he hears that in the music too; he always leans toward the record player when Femenine is on. Slowly, surely, the musicians and audience settle into the space together, tuning and chattering respectively. Then a calmly insistent vibraphone sends a series of question marks floating through the air. Eastman's piano answers with tender and patient solemnity. Wind and string instruments gather round like family members, gesturing and emphasizing. Some phrases repeat, others digress, as the circling turns musical space into familiar place. Time unfurls in this manner. No doubt shaped by my specific listening context and companion, I hear in Femenine the daily patterns central to the practice of care. To listen more closely, I started reading when my baby napped.
Born in 1940 and raised in Ithaca, New York, Julius Eastman was a child prodigy pianist and choirboy who studied piano and composition and grew into an revered composer, conductor, vocalist, and Grammy nominated performer. He was active in the ‘60s-‘80s, working with orchestras and ensembles, as well as downtown New York artists including Meredith Monk, Arthur Russell, and his jazz musician brother Gerry Eastman. Over the last decade, after a period of obscurity, his life and work has come to the attention of a wider audience through the efforts of artists including Jace Clayton and archivists including Mary Jane Leach.
In the liner notes for Femenine, Leach states that Eastman wanted to "please listeners" with Femenine. He is quoted as saying "the end sounds like the angels opening up heaven," and apparently insisted on preparing soup for the attendees to enjoy with the performance. Soup! An offering thick with symbolism: an archetypal object of care and act of service, and perhaps a theatrical way to nod toward the subtle wordplay of the title.
Eastman wrote Femenine during his residency at the University at Buffalo (UB) in New York. In the mid-late '60s, the university’s Creative Associate program invited dazzling young composers including Eastman, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, and Petr Kotik to take up salaried positions with no teaching obligations. They were expected to produce new works on campus and help shape the culture; in effect, the academy got to claim their cool and creativity as its own. As a Black gay composer in an overwhelmingly white academic music world, Eastman was all too aware that fetishization and extraction was part of the deal.
“[Y]ou cannot bring up Eastman without interrogating the demographics of the audiences at live performances of his music – mostly white liberals who sometimes seem viscerally startled to see other black people in the room, as if we are voyeurs on a private pleasure of theirs,” writes Harmony Holiday in her newsletter Black Music and Black Muses. “The strange charade this makes of Eastman’s personal edict, I want to be as black as I possibly can, becomes part of the acoustic experience — confrontational and full of neptunian delirium.”
On the UB campus, Kotik, a flautist, founded S.E.M. Ensemble in 1970 as "an association of musicians led by composers" dedicated to performing experimental new music, with Eastman a notable original member. They had a good run together — Femenine is as much a document of the ensemble's freewheeling spirit as it is Eastman's expansive vision — and, under Kotik's directorship, the S.E.M. Ensemble continues to this day.
But in 1975, Eastman quit his UB patronage following a bawdily homoerotic performance of John Cage's Song Book that pissed off its closeted creator (somewhat intentionally according to his friend Susan Stenger). "The next day an angry Cage pounded on the piano and fumed that the freedom in his music did not mean the freedom to be irresponsible," Kyle Gann later wrote in the Village Voice.
In an interview with the Buffalo Evening News in 1976, Eastman alluded to his clash with Cage: “I have discovered that most artists are uptight on [the subject of their homosexuality], afraid to reveal themselves, and afraid to reveal to the world who they are,” he said. “People fear punishment. There is always somebody who is trying to crush you. I refuse to be afraid of my comrades, of being castigated, thrown out or thought of badly.”
According to Stenger, Eastman had been “finding academia kind of limiting,” which might be putting it mildly. When he left the Creative Associates program at UB, Eastman went on to make his most politically explicit work, a series of vivid ensemble compositions with even more vivid titles: Nigger Faggot (1978), Dirty Nigger (1978), Evil Nigger (1979), Gay Guerilla (1980), and Crazy Nigger (1980). “The reason I use that particular word is, for me, it has what I call a basicness about it,” he explained in an introduction to a performance in 1980. “Upon that is the basis of the American economic system.”
The establishment was shocked, as it usually is. In spirit and effect, Eastman’s naming served as a rejection of the white Western art music world and a reminder of the slave-trading imperial-colonialist histories on which it rests. Yet somehow, now as ever, language is deemed more offensive than actual acts of subjugation.
If you read a few articles about Eastman, and there are plenty since his revival, you’ll become familiar with the quote that Holiday references: “What I am trying to achieve to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest. It is important that I learn how to be, by that I mean accept everything about me.”
That last sentence is often omitted. It is important that I learn how to be. That’s a spiritual quest, a lifelong study, and a lesson in care itself.
Eastman died in 1990, aged just 49, after an absence from the music world that involved spells of addiction and homelessness, which is where many contemporary tellings of his story begin. His work went largely unrecognized for many years because so many of his scores were lost or scattered when he was evicted from his Manhattan apartment in the early ‘80s. “I don’t give a hoot about the future, posterity or anything else along those lines,” he once presaged.
“The fragmentation is code for no, for the subject’s inherent resistance to the subjugation that is posthumous acclaim,” reflects Harmony Holiday, making reference to both Eastman’s archive and his idiosyncratic form of notation. “It’s not that Eastman intentionally fragmented anything for the sake of empty mischief, it’s that he distributed himself among those he loved through encoding himself in his notes, the blackest most hysterically romantic notes that he could gather — the, in his words “Evil Nigger” notes, that can only be accessed by those for whom they are intended.”
According to his brother Gerry Eastman, quoted in Gann’s obituary, Julius died of “mental stress causing physical deterioration... Racism within the classical world prevented him from doing the things he was doing.”
In the same obit, some of Eastman's associates point to his “enviable opportunities” as supposed evidence that he couldn’t possibly have experienced any form of structural oppression. In their words, Eastman was “undisciplined” and had “personality problems.” Sounds like Cage’s “irresponsible” or other such coded words.
On Leach’s website, she writes that it was Eastman’s integrity and honesty that put him at odds with the establishment: “He was brutally honest, which doomed him” in the “conformist” academic music world.
Eastman was certainly frank in his explanation for leaving UB: "I did not think the Creative Associates were very creative anymore. I had no power to plan programs and none of the stuff I suggested was taken up," he told the Buffalo Evening News. "When you see that your time is up, then your time is up. If you go on just for the money, and I mean I liked the money, you know that can't work."
UB was able to pay its Creative Associates a handsome salary because it received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. One of America's oldest philanthropic organizations, the Rockefeller Foundation started out life as a tax avoidance scheme for an oil magnate and has a history of funding eugenics research in Nazi Germany. Throughout the '60s and '70s, writes scholar Michael Sy Uy, "the Rockefeller Foundation contributed millions of dollars toward the establishment of new music centers at universities." Along with the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation relied on old-school-tie networks to guide their funding of a new generation of university educated composers and musicians. Their support further legitimized and privileged Western art music, which was exactly the point. Not unlike the CIA's covert support of abstract expressionist artists and jazz musicians, American corporate philanthropy funded American-made music composition as a soft power move — and set a precedent for contemporary corporate patronage. In the context of the Cold War, academic art and music exports doubled as propaganda about American freedom and democracy. And American artists that performed overseas — as Eastman did in Israel in the early ‘70s, before the BDS Movement was established — provided a cultural distraction to its violent occupation of Palestine and the Palestinian people.
As writer and scholar McKenzie Wark recently put it: “[T]he entire apparatus of officially recognized art and culture is decoration on the surface of empire.”
American academia is directly invested in the imperial war machine. No wonder it’s infinitely more rigid that it pretends to be. Experiment! But not like that! Be free! But not that free! Learn! But don’t apply those learnings!
That rigidity — or professionalism, per Harney and Moten — is unmissable these days, as universities and arts organizations and media corporations and tech giants compete to reveal themselves in increasingly grotesque ways. As Israel commits genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, professionals across the spheres of academia, media, business, and politics collude to obscure and deny, fund and support. But every time I pick up my phone or open my laptop, I catch glimpses of Israel’s brutality, broadcast to the world in real time by Palestinian journalists, doctors, mothers, fathers, and children.
Atrocity is on a loop in Gaza. There are patterns to the horror, repetitions that I feel compelled to list. Israeli occupation forces attack hospital after hospital, executing staff and patients, and turning hospital grounds into mass grave sites. Israeli occupation forces murder child after child; as they call for help, when they collect water, while they wave white flags, as they lie in the ICU, before they are even born. Israeli occupation forces block aid again and again, starving children to death, making pregnancy a living nightmare, and leaving new mothers too malnourished to produce milk. Israeli occupation forces commit flour massacre after flour massacre, opening fire on starving people as they wait in vain for aid. Israeli occupation forces drop bomb after bomb, destroying all of Gaza’s schools and universities, hundreds of its mosques and churches, and countless cultural archives, libraries, and museums. And for reporting on each and every one of these atrocities, Israeli occupation forces murder journalist after journalist, often along with their families.
I am trying to pay attention to the colonial patterns that repeat in front of my eyes because I never want to forget what I am witnessing. I never want to forget that Israel is able to keep on committing war crime after war crime because it has the full backing of America and Britain. I never want to forget that Israel, America, and Britain are three peas in a pod: built on genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, imperialism, and structural racism. I never want to forget all the people who want to raze Gaza so they can build holiday homes on stolen blood-soaked land. I never want to forget all the newspapers like the New York Times that are busy manufacturing consent for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza because atrocity is always profitable. Most of all, I never want to forget the potency of Palestinian resistance.
“Do not underestimate the power of refusal,” wrote New York artist Hiro Kone on Twitter last month. “The act of refusal is important and we are at a pivotal moment where your refusal means something more than ever.”
There are many ways to practice refusal, as Julius Eastman demonstrated in his life and legacy. To refuse is to be difficult, to refuse is to practice care. This moment is alive with patterns of refusal, in so many indelibly different forms. One day I’ll share them with my child as we circle the sun some more.