Julius Eastman: Listening as Biography
An interview with BlackBox Ensemble's Leonard Bopp and Yale's Isaac Jean-François
BlackBox Ensemble has two concerts coming up: one is May 3 (Saturday) at The Space at Irondale and part of Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival. The other is May 11 at the Whitney and presented by Public Records. I’m going to both. You should, too.
Conducted by Leonard Bopp and curated (or, as he likes to say, co-curated) by Yale Eastman scholar Isaac Jean-François (read his 2020 Current Musicology article here), both concerts aim to question our tendency to speculate about Eastman—his thoughts, his scores, his loves, his life. With music by Hildegard von Bingen, Barbara Kolb, Gérard Griseyand, and a gay house music dance party DJ’ed by Lovie & Honey Bun to cap off the Whitney show, this isn’t the typical “Eastmania” retrospective. Instead, it imagines a typical day-in-the-life of Eastman, based on archival research by Jean-François but leaving room to imagine what his day would have looked like. Wake up, rehearse medieval music, rehearse his own music, go to a club at night.
For two nights only, you can—more or less—live like Julius Eastman.
I interviewed Bopp and Jean-François on Monday’s episode of The Best Is Noise on Radio Free Brooklyn. The episode is available to stream here and the edited and abridged transcript is below.1 Enjoy!
Gambuzza: I’m going to kind of straddle between you guys and try to get a really full picture of what we’re trying to do here. I want to start with Isaac to talk about the curation of this. Let me just read a little description about the concert: “It invites audiences into a bold reimagining of one of the singular voices of American music. It moves beyond the typical retrospective.” But I kind of already said this about “music that Julius heard.” So, just tell me about the idea behind this and why you’re doing it.
Jean-François: I really do think that it should be listed as a co-curated exercise because Leonard has just been a total force as it concerns the pairing and selection of the works for these concerts.
Bopp: Well, we each had our passions that we brought to the table.
Jean-François: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. When Leonard approached me to potentially do a sort of curated portrait concert about Eastman, I initially was like [sighs], you know. There have been so many of these, which is wonderful and important. Some have called it “the Eastmania.”
Gambuzza: I’ve heard of this.
Jean-François: And they’re more often than not always paired with—you know, you get the selection of most outrageously titled works—and they’re more often than not paired with program notes or discussions around it that are a lot of doom-and-gloom and, “Now, finally, he’s getting his flowers.”
Gambuzza: A victim, sort of.
Jean-François: A victim-narrative kind of deal, which was—and is—incredibly frustrating to me. So, what I’ve been thinking a lot more about in my work, and in my interactions with Eastman and his sound: How do we author and interact with listening as its own biographical practice? How does listening to the sounds that a person may or may not have heard—sounds that were very similar to the musical environment around the figure—how is that a way to get into the mind of a figure? How is that a way for us to reconstitute their biography, especially in a case like this where it’s a patchy story. We only have fragments of Eastman’s life known to us “in the record.” So, rather than speculate on this disaster that he experienced or that joy that he experienced, why not speculate on the sonic environment that he might have found himself in? So, I presented it as an imagined day-in-the-life, really, of Eastman. I appreciated Leonard’s elasticity in, really, entertaining this strange exercise that I wanted for the audience, which was: Go from an imagined rehearsal in the morning with a student group, with early music—
Gambuzza: Did this actually happen?
Jean-François: Well, that’s the piece that’s exciting, and I’m really knocking myself here because I recall in my lovely visit to the music library at Buffalo—
Gambuzza: Where he spent a lot of time.
Jean-François: Born in New York City, then Ithaca, then spends a lot of his professional life in Buffalo. So, I came across this program, and I can’t remember the name of it. It was something like “University Chamber Ensemble” or something like that in ’69, ’70, ’71—the earlier years of when Eastman arrived at Buffalo. And it was a group that played what they called rare and unheard of musics, and it was a program of early music.
Gambuzza: It was a student group?
Jean-François: Yeah.
Gambuzza: And what was his role?
Jean-François: He was the director. If I’m remembering this correctly. I was a real square with my interactions with this archive and a librarian told me, “No pictures.” And so, I didn’t take any pictures, and I should have, perhaps, donned a little bit of Eastman’s ethic and taken the damn pictures. But I will find it; I will find this program. So, I imagined him working with this group for however long he did—with this small ensemble—and going to a concert of his own music and the music of his peers in the evening, and then going out afterwards to a bar and listening to house music. I wanted to pair the early sound, the new music, and gay house music at the end. What this concert has become is totally beyond me in terms of where I thought that this would go, and it’s a true, true blessing. So much excitement.
Gambuzza: I was really surprised to see Hildegard von Bingen on the concert. That’s one of the composers—medieval, 14th century? 12th century?
Bopp: Oh no!
[Group laughs.]
Gambuzza: Back then—
Bopp: Yeah, “back then.”
Gambuzza: She was a nun, and she composed. We’re going really far back here. What were some of the other sounds that you were surprised he listened to? We already knew about jazz because that influenced the minimalism style. We knew about improvisation and that kind of stuff, but what were some other surprising ones?
Jean-François: I guess there are two kinds of imagined listenings that I’m trying to think about here as we move through this concert, but also as I continue to write about Eastman and other figures around him in the thesis. The imagined listening of what he might have listened to, and the imagined listenings of what his sounds suggests in its formal qualities.
Gambuzza: Suggests as in, a future music?
Jean-François: Well, he’s a virtuosic singer who hits some really fantastic ranges, and what other music is doing that? What other sound traditions are doing that? How does listening to that also honor his aesthetic practice and expanse? He’s doing the early music; he at one point— He had such an expansive repertoire, as anybody would—as any composer who went to conservatory would be exposed to all this kind of music. The early music: Thomas Morley is one. He’s doing the Wagner moment, singing.
Gambuzza: What do you mean, “the Wagner moment”?
Jean-François: He sung—
Gambuzza: Oh, singing Wagner. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jean-François: And I want to be clear that this is exceptional in terms of the range of sounds that he’s performing, but I imagine if you found a singer, they would be singing a wide range of classical pieces.
Gambuzza: But with Wagner, what was the context he was singing this? Was he singing in an opera? Or was this in a sort of discrete excerpted performance?
Jean-François: I think both. I think both. These were the moments when I say, “Everyone should refer to the heavy-hitting literature on Eastman.”
Gambuzza: But you are the literature [laughs].
Jean-François: No, I know. I like to say that while everybody considers me a musicologist, I really do think of myself as more of an aesthetic wanderer and reception historian. And so, I say all of this to say, at the end of the collected volume of essays on Eastman—Gay Guerrilla—edited by Mary Jane Leach and Renee Levine-Packer, there’s a chronology at the end of this text that kind of charts out year by year what he was performing, where he was, highlights in his life. And so, I’m curious that he’s listening to all of this classical music, then in the mid-’70s has this free jazz moment—experimental jazz music moment—with his brother, who you’ve interviewed.
Gambuzza: Actually, could we talk about that for a second? Because I want to get your thoughts on this. So, Julius’s brother, Gerry Eastman, is still a free jazz guitarist at his jazz club in Williamsburg, The Williamsburg Music Center, and no one had—very few people had—interviewed him, so I was really interested, and I interviewed him two years ago, and it’s in The Village Voice, if you want to read it. He said some wild things, and I wanted to get the other side of this, because he said some things about Julius that were so definitive, but I don’t know if it could possibly be true. One of these things—
Jean-François: Which I would say is kind of the story with this character, and it’s part of the beauty as much as the mystery of Eastman’s story is how much rumor is a bulk of the narrative here. And there’s the queer theorist, José Esteban Muñoz who writes about ephemera as evidence, and the role that these little snippets of rumors actually as a queer practice of storytelling, biography, on and on it goes.
Gambuzza: Gossip.
Jean-François: Yeah, gossip, literally.
Gambuzza: That’s awesome. So, we were talking about different kinds of music that he was influenced by, and one of them, as we said, was jazz. And so, I asked Gerry Eastman about John Cage—because he was in that scene too with the S.E.M. Ensemble—and Peter Kotik are people he mentioned. Gerry said that he knew those people, and he used to see John Cage. And I asked him what John Cage thought of Julius, and Gerry said, “Well, he and Julius didn’t get along because Julius said his shit was bullshit.” He was very impassioned when he was telling me this. I think it comes out. “He did some of John Cage’s shit, and he did it way better than John Cage.” And I said, “Why did he think it was bullshit?” And he said, “Like sitting at the piano for 20 minutes and not playing it and calling that a piece.” So, in your findings, how fair do you think this is? Is that what Julius thought?
Jean-François: I think that more of us need to be less bold about saying what Eastman thought. I want to respect the family connection there. That’s a level of intimacy and insider knowledge that we don’t have access to. I bet my sister could say some crazy shit about me.
[Group laughs.]
Gambuzza: But it was interesting because it was music, and we were talking about famous figures, and I didn’t mean it to be personal. It was about the music.
Jean-François: But see this is exactly the problem—the brilliant, bubbling problem of Eastman: It is about the music or is it about the personal? It’s so curious that the ’75 song books incident where Eastman famously performs one of Cage’s song book series—Perform a Disciplined Action—that’s the score—Perform a Disciplined Action. And he gives this ridiculous, perverse lecture on sex between two—I think he imagines them as kind of like—primordial figures, and one of them ends up naked at the end. I mean, it’s like a really risqué performance. There are recordings of this work, and Cage was furious. Cage was absolutely furious. And it really did bring to a head this thing. Cage at one point said something to the effect of: Eastman is so wrapped up in ego and homosexuality that he can’t get at the music.
Gambuzza: A lot of the time when I go to new classical music or experimental music concerts, a lot of the music, I feel like there’s no sex in it.
Jean-François: Yeah.
Gambuzza: And this is like the rare example in this sort of music where there’s sex, and he allows himself to be open to sex. And John Cage— It seems like that’s going against the status quo, obviously, but it’s like sometimes these concerts are just so inhuman and not sexual.
Jean-François: Yeah, that’s the thing: When you’ve got a scene—and as much as I’m obsessed with this time period of music-making, I am no expert at all—you’ve got one track of it that’s doing a bunch of shit with computers, and you’ve another track that’s rolling dice, and—
Gambuzza: [Laughs] where did that go?
Jean-François: And these are beautiful, wonderful, trance-like, chance-like musical works, and so much of it is like: No, no, no, there’s no body, there’s no social; this is transcending all of that. And Eastman comes in, and even if he was to do the beep boop bop, repeating figures, whatever—even if he was to do that—he would still be read as what great critic Greg Tate might say as the “the flyboy in the buttermilk.” I think George Lewis also brings it up in talking about Eastman. But that’s the exceptionality that I’m always curious about in Eastman’s life, in my life, where there’s this wow factor of just being in the room in these environments. If you look at the photographs of Eastman and just the photographic contrast where the ink is just blocking out all of the features—it’s wild how the material is always, or more often than not, mimicking the social effect of Eastman’s—
Gambuzza: Like the medium of photography is created by the social—
Jean-François: Or just when a person looking, and it’s like, “Damn, he’s Black!”
Gambuzza: Right.
Jean-François: “Damn, he’s the only Black one!” He’s so Black, he’s the only Black one, and that’s wild. And also, they made whatever the photograph might have been taking—it might have been at a concert that was an hour of the same note being played at the same— So, it’s this incredible contrast that’s happening.
Gambuzza: And it’s the wow factor that people, I think, have trouble getting over because the racial component does seem like the only thing a lot of the time, and also like you said: The outlandish names, a lot of just violent actions that need to be performed, for example, on the piano, and it’s hard to get over that for a lot of people.
Jean-François: Absolutely.
Gambuzza: Then again, it’s not if you just focus on the music. But talking about the music, I want to talk a little bit about how you guys work together and form these concerts.
Jean-François: Yes, Leonard, come in please!
[Group laughs.]
Bopp: No. I've been enjoying this. Please, it’s fine!
Gambuzza: Actually, he’s been asleep.
[Group laughs.]
Bopp: No, no, no. I’m loving it.
Gambuzza: One of the things about Julius’ music is that very little of it is written down. Julius didn’t write scores. He didn’t write through-composed music that you could hand off to somebody and say, “Play this on the piano.” So, a lot of the work of playing Julius Eastman’s music is reconstructing it from recordings and people talking about it—oral histories or just interviewing people who played with him. And so, every ensemble handles it differently. How did the BlackBox Ensemble handle it?
Bopp: Well, first, I will say, Julius Eastman— You say that there is no score in the sense that, yeah, it’s not like we have a score and there are parts and people follow their part, and it aligns beautifully. No, it really requires— The score is more like a collective guide through the piece, and it requires everybody to read together off of this guide. The scores are often, I would say, loosely composed. You’ll have little melodies. You’ll have some chords, tone clusters, some general dynamics, maybe some rhythms. It’s not nothing, but it does leave a lot up to interpretation.
Gambuzza: Now, just with that, obviously, we can’t speculate—like you said, Isaac—about what Julius possibly thought or intended a lot of the time. But how much of that is because of the archive and the scores we have, and how much of it is what Julius maybe wanted to leave open to interpretation?
Bopp: It’s such a good question. I'm no expert on this in terms of what was lost, but I do know that Eastman, towards the end of his life, struggled with homelessness. And I believe the consensus is that many of his scores may have been lost after he was evicted from his East Village apartment in the early- to mid-’80s. So, it’s possible, as far as I know, that there might be more music out there than what we have. There are, for some pieces, recordings that he was involved in making that have been kind of seen as the definitive takes or at least the definitive guides. The S.E.M. Ensemble recordings, but not for every piece. Not for every piece.
Gambuzza: Is that seen as definitive by scholars or by the musicians who worked with him? Who is that seen as definitive by?
Jean-François: It’s a kind of mixture of both. Leonard, you could talk more about the musician part of it.
Bopp: Well, now you actually have me stepping back and thinking maybe we need to reframe what it means for it to be definitive. Because that’s part of the project here of speculative listening. You could equally turn it into a speculative performance, right? Not only is that acceptable and necessary in this context, but the piece demands that you embrace that. So, maybe I should retrace my steps a little bit and say rather than definitive guide, it is a guide based on what we know of Eastman’s presence in the room. And then, without a doubt, the piece leaves room, and in fact, demands that the performers sort of co-compose it and make their own way through it. So, I don’t know if there is a definitive version or if there’s meant to be a definitive version of these works. And I think that, again, going back to the idea that we don’t know what was lost, we don’t know if there was more notation. But I think what we can presume is that these works, Eastman developed through very close relationships with the musicians who were playing them. And so, that sort of collaborative process was baked into how they approached it. The scores that Eastman came with that were guides, that were ideas, that were fragments, then he could work with the musicians who were in the room with him, and they collectively created the piece. I think Eastman absolutely and very consciously blurs the boundary between composer and performer, and in fact, there are some stories of him getting some flak for this.
Gambuzza: From musicians?
Bopp: Yeah.
Jean-François: Yeah. There’s a video, one of the few videos that we have of him in ’74 —this should be online—at some concert in Glasgow, and he’s doing a pre-concert remark on how some of the performers are upset that they’re not getting paid in the way that the composer is.
Gambuzza: Commensurate with the service of composing.
Jean-François: Right. They are composing the work. And there are stories of him coming in with a sort of idea or gesture of a piece, and then them, you know, workshopping it and getting it together for that performance.
Gambuzza: And they might not be as dedicated to it as he is because they are just working musicians.
Jean-François: But you know, the other thing is that, on the point of this whole speculative turn—which I think is happening in academia, alive and well, and we’re definitely bringing it in here—I wonder if he was even down for: We need the whole thing written down; We need the whole thing engraved.
Gambuzza: Well, he was also kind of like a messy person. He wasn’t organized.
Jean-François: Right. Exactly, exactly. And I think that part of what I hope discussions about Eastman and other experimental makers turns into is: I have this feeling that Eastman thought x, and also, it’s exposing y about me. That last part isn’t always attached to the speculation about what he thought or—
Gambuzza: About me, the person who is speculating it?
Jean-François: Exactly. Yeah. I just think that that’s such an important part that is lost in this conversation because so much of the desire to recover him and to get the whole story and to put together all of these fragments is actually about us. It’s actually about us being, you know, really frustrated or concerned or whatever.
Gambuzza: It’s also these giant classical corporations—like a big hall—trying to seem woke or that they have a diverse lineup of composers or whatever.
Jean-François: Yeah, exactly. So, that’s the problem. That’s the problem. I would rather them program the stuff and be like, “And this is our token moment,” and just say it explicitly: “Just so you know, this is just gonna pop up for this moment and we’re gonna continue this business as usual.” I would much rather that.
Gambuzza: But it’s all pretending.
Jean-François: Right. Of course.
Gambuzza: So, when you worked with your musicians at BlackBox, walk me through the process of, say, you say, “We’re gonna do Joy Boy.” What happens in that first rehearsal?
Bopp: We really just sit down with the score, which in the case of Joy Boy is one page.
Gambuzza: And what does it look like?
Bopp: It’s a bunch of fragments. It’s a bunch of, you know, a series of ideas, chords. Some of them have dynamics notated. Some of the chords and fragments really don’t. There’s very little rhythm notated. And it’s really just a process of collective imagination. We sit through and, in this particular case, I—as the music director—have done a little bit of preparatory work in just making the cells clear, coming up with a general sense of the timing that we’re gonna move through the piece. We use timers to keep track of roughly when we move from one cell to the next.
Gambuzza: Just on your phone?
Bopp: Yeah. On our on our phones or tablets for the performers who are using tablets. And then after that, it’s a process of really listening to each other and trying to have that give and take between matching what’s existing and what other players are putting into the atmosphere. And then also sometimes interjecting something new and being really attentive and alive to the idea that you can have infinite variations of this piece, and it can be different every time. I think that what you said, Isaac, about: It’s an invitation and a demand that you bring yourself into the piece. That's something we've kept coming back to in our conversations. So many times, we’ll land on something about Eastman, and I’ll think: Well, isn’t that really pretty universally true? Which is, it should be thought of as true that in any piece of concert music, we are bringing ourselves into it by way of interpretation. And we could get into the we could get into the debates about to what extent are to what extent do we have interpretive freedom? To what extent are we honoring the composer? But I think fundamentally, even if we pledge a great deal of allegiance—which I’m not opposed to—to the composer, we as performers are making micro-decisions all the time that would dictate how we approach the piece. And we wouldn't want it any other way. Music would be incredibly boring if we didn’t have that. But Eastman’s work really demands it and makes it explicit. And that’s another thread that, as we worked on this project, Eastman in all of these ways—and I’m sure we'll come to more truths throughout this this conversation—but Eastman invites us to change the way we think about the act of performing concert music, the act of listening to concert music.
Gambuzza: In what way does he want us to change listening? We’ve talked about musicians. What about the audience?
Bopp: I wonder, for example—if you’re inviting the performers to bring this degree of freedom and interpretation and spontaneity—I wonder how that invites the audience to listen differently. You’re listening to something that is unfixed. You’re listening to something that is constantly becoming before you every time there’s a new performance. And, again, going back to that idea of: And isn’t that always true? Right? This is true of concert music in general. You could be listening to a romantic symphony, and yet, here we are in 2025, and it’s being performed anew before you. And every time it’s performed—and this is by virtue of recordings, tradition—there are all these traditions behind it. The piece is constantly shaping and reshaping. So, this is true in concert music or of classical music of all stripes. Eastman’s music just makes it really explicit: It demands an awareness—not just from the performers, but audience members—that this is something being shaped in the moment. That this is something that, is different every time and constantly alive and new.
Gambuzza: Which is its own version of speculation.
Bopp: Exactly.
Gambuzza: The musicians themselves are, in a way, speculating.
Jean-François: No, totally.
Bopp: Exactly, yes.
Gambuzza: There’s like three meanings of speculation that we’ve covered. One is the more counterproductive one, which is asking what Julius might think of something. Another one is the curation of the concerts themselves, which is based on the archive; so, not just a random guess what Julius was and might have been listening to. But there’s also a speculation by the musicians themselves. That’s really interesting.
Bopp: Absolutely, yeah.
Jean-François: I would just say on the audience point too—I think because we love this music so much and adore it so much that perhaps we lose sight of the ear that is not accustomed to the sound or hasn’t been around the sound a lot. It’s a lot! It’s a lot. You’re sitting down for an hour-plus, and a lot of this music is very subtly transforming over that period of time.
Gambuzza: And sometimes violently.
Bopp: Yeah!
Jean-François: Well, thinking about just time, period. When I say “this music,” I’m talking about this style of minimalist or as Marc Hannaford— the musicologist, music theorist—might call it, minimalisms, because there’s a multiplicity of them, as we hear them in Eastman. And I think that that’s not a sexy thing to say: “This might be boring.” “This might be a lot.” “This might be drawn out.” Right? But I think that if we’re gonna get more people to listen to this kind of music, if we’re gonna get more people to listen to classical music, I think that we should be talking about it in a lot more accessible terms. And to Leonard’s point about time, the timing is not only holding the whole performance together between performers. More often than not, you’ll be in a concert of Eastman’s work, and if they do the works for several pianos with the timers or iPads or whatever performers are using facing the audience, we also see that we’re in a time situation. And I’m often looking at the timers where people are resting their scores and realizing, “Okay, we’re moving into the next phase now.” Like, this is an active of durational endurance. Now, on the point of endurance, as I write about, and think about this violence of the sound—what I’ve often thought of as sort of, in some pieces, a train wreck on top of you, this barreling down of repeating figures, of intense articulation of notes—you could also think about this in in terms of his vocal performance and the ranges that that he hits that I talked about earlier. That’s its own audience endurance moment. There’s a famous example of this with the piece Femenine. He had designed these bells that would play repeatedly throughout the entire piece— and Richard Valitutto really offered some wonderful color to the story for me about these bells—but they were horrible to listen to. I mean, they were just like, “Ahhh, this is so much.” Right? That’s part of it! It’s like, this is a lot!
Gambuzza: I love this idea of endurance because, I think, it’s not new either. A couple weeks ago, I went to a performance of the St. John Passion by Bach at Carnegie Hall. I had never heard the St. John Passion. But I was really struggling 75% of the way through because it’s not a hit-parade-passion like the St. Matthew Passion maybe is. So, I was like: Oh, this is kinda painful. And then I’m like: Well, you know, it’s about the passion of Christ. It’s about the pain that Christ is going through. And maybe it doesn’t feel good, but isn’t it beautiful or something that the audience does have that same experience of the person or the narrative that the music is trying to portray? That exact experience is not—that’s not the first thing that comes to people’s minds when they think about music in general.
Jean-François: Absolutely.
Bopp: Yeah.
Gambuzza: Because it’s something to enjoy. Which is why I wanted to— You said that if we want to get more people to listen to this music or classical music— Part of my show is all about: How do we get more people listening? But also: Why do we even want to get more people listening? Why would we want to get more people listening to this stuff? Which is obviously, like you said, one of the goals of this at the Long Play Festival.
Bopp: I want to pick up on a thread that you just introduced, which I think will lead us there, which is: I think we need to make room and embrace discomfort in all art. Art can be beautiful. Art can be entertaining. That’s fine. Art can also be really searing. We should allow art to make the audience uncomfortable, whether that’s a test of physical endurance, whether it’s a really high intensity of the music—almost a violence. And this is something we can talk about later, but this is a thread that’s picked up too in in the Grisey [Périodes]—a music that is really, really quite violent and intense and can be, uncomfortable to listen to in some ways. I think that that’s a really important thread with Eastman. There are moments in Eastman’s music of such joy and transcendence and radiance.
Gambuzza: Epiphanic.
Bopp: Yeah.
Gambuzza: Unbridled.
Bopp: Unbridled. And there are moments of such pain, and I think this is where the question of embodiment comes in and what the music is embodying. One of the other threads of this project is to pick up: Eastman has such an appetite for sonority that he is picking up and drawing the sonorities that he’s hearing in all these different physical spaces and social spaces and environmental spaces and political spaces. And all of that can be brought to bear on the music. And I would argue too that when we get to the question of listening, how we listen, how we interpret, we are always bringing—whether we know it or not consciously—we’re always bringing our inner ears, our socially shaped ears to how we listen. So, all of that is to bear too on the listening experience. But this is where I think it’s incredibly powerful to recognize that Eastman was operating often in spaces that had historically been hostile to bodies and voices like his.
Gambuzza: The white downtown New York minimalism scene of the 1960s and ’70s.
Bopp: And also, canonic classical music institutions. And I think that, I am very much not of the belief that we should fixate on the identities that shaped him. I think we need to let the music speak for itself and not brand him by these identities. Especially, we talked earlier about the degree to which it can come across as incredibly tokenizing, the way that Eastman is portrayed sometimes in this sort of renaissance that we’ve experienced of him—the Eastmania, to your point, which is, on the one hand, a really wonderful thing. And I think we need to think hard about the ethics of doing it. Right? All of this is to say that part of this, if we are to do it well and if we are to do it ethically, is to say: This is gonna be uncomfortable because you are listening to a sonic embodiment of a body and a voice that experienced pain in a lot of the spaces that this music is drawing from. And you can hear that often in the music. Yeah?
Jean-François: I think so. And also, there’s a point where you’re the odd one out in a scene and you’re just like: I’m just gonna act crazy. And it’s not about refusal.
Gambuzza: You mean performing the music, or do you mean in life?
Jean-François: I think in performing the music, I think in life. I think that one, if I could say to me of July 2020 Current Musicology article, is: We need to reel back a little bit on the refusal bit.
Gambuzza: The refusal to what?
Jean-François: Constantly seeing Eastman—any of the more provocative or outrageous elements of his work—as a protest to his exceptional experience. As a protest to the whiteness, the hyper-cis-hetero-masculine situation, of that scene. Because another way to behave is just: You’re just weird. And you’re so over doing the protest bit and refusing bit, that you’re just like: I’m gonna behave in a way that’s just kinda third-space. And what happens in listening to the music there is, we’re like: Oh. The image that comes to mind immediately when I think about this is, when they put the—we’re gonna go here with the associates, please.
Gambuzza: Let’s do it.
Jean-François: The bank robbery, the bags of cash, and the color packs that they put in them. I don’t know if this is my Netflix crime show obsession showing here.
[Group laughs.]
Jean-François: And they’re running out of the banks, and these color packs explode. And now all the money’s got evidence of this of this stolenness on top of it. Right? When we start listening to that third-place of the weirdness, we’re like: Oh, wait, now more stuff is coming up. Like: Oh, wait, I want to listen to him in this constant state of protest; that’s the only way that I can digest this music, but it’s bringing up other stuff. He’s moaning. It sounds sexual. Is it? I don't know. Is that about me? What I’m bringing to it? I don’t like sitting in the opera, and I’m the only one. Do I wanna draw Eastman here to sit next to me? Is that what I'm doing to make me feel more comfortable in this? Like, then we start to see all of the other elements of listening and relating to an aesthete of the past who, on face value, it looks like we’re really similar in terms of our feeling and experience of alienation, but we’re learning that there’s a whole bunch of misrecognition that even we are doing as compassionate ears towards his sound and practice.
Gambuzza: This is a tall order to ask for the audience.
Jean-François: Yeah, totally.
Gambuzza: And I think that’s one of the hard parts. I sometimes think that this must be somebody’s experience out there. I sometimes think that if a listener didn't know anything about Julius Eastman and went to go see his music, I would love to interview that listener, and then not tell him anything about Julius but hear what they thought. Because I think the first thing I heard of Eastman was back in college—like 2017—on the recording, the album that is black and red, and it has him hunched over.
Jean-François: Unjust Malaise.
Gambuzza: That one. I heard that, and here’s what’s funny: I hated it, and yet, I didn’t un-save it from my library. A lot of the times when I don’t like something, I un-save it from Spotify or Tidal or whatever, but I kept it because once a year or so, I would be like: Huh, that was a weird thing.
Jean-François: I love that story. That’s wonderful.
Gambuzza: It’s unclear to say what his music exactly does because that’s my experience at least.
Jean-François: No, that’s wonderful. In that experience, I’m hearing some kind of bittersweet taste that we get. Like, sometimes I’m like: You know what? Do I really like Negronis?
Bopp: [Laughs.]
Jean-François: Am I just doing it for the vibe? What is this harshness that I’m also oddly attracted to? Let me try it again. And I’m like, you know what? Let’s just—
Gambuzza: You ever had a mezcal Negroni?
Jean-François: Yes!
Gambuzza: I’ve been so into them lately.
Jean-François: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Bopp: That’s the move.
Jean-François: Wait, that might be the summer
Gambuzza: Oh, it’s fantastic. I’m getting everybody into this drink this summer. I swear to God. I was talking to a bartender at a party a couple weeks ago, and she had never made one. I’m like, you gotta, yeah. I’m getting everybody into this.
Jean-François: No, but that’s a beautiful story. That’s a beautiful story about aesthetic experience, where— We live in a world of extremes. You either love it or you hate it. And just like what Leonard was talking about earlier, you arrive at the score and who knows what Macle will sound like at the third listening. Because it contours your approach to the listening.
Bopp: Because the piece constantly eludes you, the piece constantly eludes itself. It is it is full of surprises at every turn because it has to be. That’s baked in structurally.
Jean-François: But we should be able to say: Actually, that piece is grating, and I listen to it once a year, and I give it another chance, and I still think it’s grading, and that’s a relationship and an honor and a connection with the work, too. Anyway— I’m running through with this scene, but I think that that’s a great point, especially with people who deserve their flowers. There’s not a lot of criticism, too. I’d love to hear more of that.
Gambuzza: Of Julius’s music?
Jean-François: Yeah, absolutely!
Gambuzza: Well, but that’s the funny thing. I think for a regular listener, I think it’s very easy to criticize his music. For a normal guy on the street, it is grating. It is ugly. Like, screw it. Just say what you feel, you know? And I think it’s something about music critics wanting to get their one sentence description of a concert in the promotional materials of it. But it definitely is. We need both sides of it.
Jean-François: Totally. But on the point on the point of the ugly, which I think is another term that is a really apt description of a lot of the sound that has been popularized out of Eastman’s archive, and I’m glad that we’re gonna be playing pieces that have not gotten as much coverage as they could be, though they have been performed—
Bopp: Joy Boy’s pretty standard at this point, but Buddha and Macle are a bit more—
Jean-François: Exactly.
Gambuzza: When you were curating this program, did you feel like you were making, at any point, any concessions to, like, “We should probably throw in Joy Boy.” Or not?
Jean-François: No. I said that from the beginning.
Bopp: No.
Gambuzza: So, what was that mindset like? Did you just wanna be uncompromising with it, or what kind of program is this?
Bopp: Well, it really came from: Okay, we’re gonna do Eastman, and we’re gonna do Eastman in a way that is, in a way, about Eastman and the music, but it’s also about the wide world that it draws on and that it opens up. And so, I think the selection of the Eastman pieces actually sort of came more in dialogue with the themes that we were interested in exploring and the other pieces that we thought offered compelling aesthetic tie-ins. To begin the concert, we begin with a Hildegard plainchant, quia ergo femina.
Jean-François: Which I’m so ready to hear. I’m so ready to hear it.
Gambuzza: Oh, you haven’t heard the performance yet?
Jean-François: No.
Bopp: Yes, I’m excited for you to hear what we’re doing with it too. And at The Whitney only, we will be performing Macle, which is a rarely—
Jean-François: My favorite.
Bopp: And this was a piece that Isaac introduced me to. It’s a rarely done vocal quartet. In this particular context, we knew that we wanted to have some sort of early music component because of Eastman’s affiliations that you talked about earlier, Isaac, with early music as a performer, as a teacher. And Macle, to us, was one, a piece that you felt strongly about and wanted to do, but also one that would kind of be in conversation with early vocal music that he was performing.
Jean-François: Right. I would just say—to go back—I’ve said the one part about the ugliness, and there’s also a sweetness that comes through the listening experience, too. And it’s that sweetness that I will mention in one moment, that brings me, listening-wise, to making the associations to, say, Miss Hildy or to other works in the program. And that is overtone. That is the ways sound and some of Eastman’s work—even in the pieces with the barreling train-wreck sound, the ugly—you get these beautiful overtones in the moments of the works where all of the sound sort of stops and it’s like bong bong. You used the term earlier, “atmosphere.” A dear friend and someone who I’m always turning to and for academic and theoretical listening inspiration, Jade Conlee, who writes about atmosphere. There is a beautiful atmosphere that is also so important to his work. And when you go to plainchant, what else are we— I mean, please, we’re so reminded of—
Gambuzza: Of the space.
Jean-François: Exactly. Exactly.
Gambuzza: Yeah, I remember, what was it? Is it the symphony? There’s only one symphony that we know of. Right? It’s the symphony number two. I remember I heard it played in at Alice Tulley last year or the year before, and I’d never heard it. And I remember there’s this moment where there’s either a massive crescendo with—I don't know how many timpani there—like, 12 timpani—or it’s a huge fortissississimo of timpani for minutes straight being really loud. And I only have experienced that sort of low resonance in a chapel when an organ is playing. Or one time I saw the Symphonie Fantastique at Woolsey, actually, and I was in the front and the wood resonated, and that was awesome.
Jean-François: Oh, that’s cool.
Gambuzza: In the march movement. It can fill a whole space. And I think sometimes when we think about Eastman’s music, we think of it in this immediate way. It immediately hits us, or it’s like an intimate experience. But actually, it can be huge and spatial.
Jean-François: Well, see, this is wonderful. That’s exactly how I want to continue to think about this figure and other musicians like it. This is the portrait; this is listening-as-biography. Here, we’re getting—in the pairing of works that have similar textures to them—we’re getting added understanding of how his sound works. Not drawing equivalencies, not flattening him to one bucket, but saying: This feature—the overtones. This feature—the polyphony. The dual voices. The genderless sound. That is also so important.
Gambuzza: That is music.
Jean-François: Totally.
Bopp: Definitely.
Thanks to my dear friend and colleague Tyler Loveless for transcribing this interview.