By Warren Burt - 31 July, 2024
I was an undergraduate at the State University at Albany between 1967 and 1971. Sometime during that period (probably about 1969 or 1970), I attended a concert by the Creative Associates, a group of paid young professional performers and composers based at our sister school, the State University at Buffalo. This group was organized by Lucas Foss and Lejaren Hiller. Later, Morton Feldman became a guiding light for the group. Younger artists in the group included Jan Williams, percussionist, Petr Kotik from the Czech Republic, Roberto Laneri, from Italy (who I later got to know very well when he moved to the University of California, San Diego in the early 70s), among others. One of the others was an amazingly energetic African-American composer, vocalist and keyboardist named Julius Eastman. Like me, he too was from Upstate New York – he had grown up in Ithaca. (I was from Albany.) On this concert, the group performed a piece by the British composer Peter Maxwell-Davies called “Eight Songs for a Mad King.” Its central part was a virtuosic vocal solo that Maxwell-Davies had originally written for the South African singer Roy Hart. It was full of experimental techniques for voice, and also required extensive active skills from the soloist as well. I was extremely impressed (blown away would be another way of saying it) by Julius Eastman’s performance. It was a notch above just about anything else I had seen at that point. Seeing as how there was a lot of interchange between the students at Albany and Buffalo, I got a chance to meet and hang out with the CA-s (as they were known) and many long-standing associations and friendships began there, including with Julius. As I remember, our shared history of being Upstate New York Anglican Choirboys, (which we were both trying to live down) was a point of contact between us.
In early 1971, at Albany, Joel Chadabe (who directed the Albany Electronic Music Studio) organized a rather large festival of contemporary music. The culmination of this festival was a performance (I believe it was the 2nd or maybe 3rd) of John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s multi-media collaborative composition HPSCHD for multiple harpsichords (our version used three), up to 46 simultaneous tape recordings (we had 16), many slide and film projectors (including several projectors showing films from NASA), and a rock-and-roll liquid projector light show. The piece went for about 4 hours. As performances of this piece were rare, people from all over the East Coast came to see it. I was one of the technical crew putting the piece on. My memory is that the Campus Art Gallery, a fairly large space, was crowded for most of the time. Since one of the composers, Lejaren Hiller, was from Buffalo, there was a large contingent of the Creative Associates that came to see the performance. Among them were Julius Eastman and Petr Kotik, who by now were old friends. Upstate New York’s capricious winter weather was true to form, however, and during the performance, a blizzard began. It continued unabated well after the ostensible midnight finishing of the piece. No one could go anywhere – the campus was completely snowed in. This was regarded by Cage, Hiller and Chadabe as merely an inconvenience. A party was planned for after the performance anyway, and if it went to 2 or 2:30 am (by which time the snow-plows had cleared some ways out of the campus and into downtown Albany) that was not so bad of a problem. Naturally, everyone’s accommodation plans were thrown into disarray. So my student share-house in downtown ended up with several unexpected guests, among them Julius and Petr. We had enough couches to accommodate everyone, fortunately. The next morning, I played host to our houseful of guests, and made pancakes for all. I remember Julius was especially mischievous that morning and was flirting rather outrageously with me and my housemates. HPSCHD was an amazing piece, and the social occasion was equally fun. The misadventure with the blizzard was, to my mind, just the icing (literally) on the cake to end the event.
Eastman and Cage escape the blizzard, 1971. Photo courtesy of Warren Burt.
I kept up with Julius over the years. By this time, I was a post-graduate student myself, now at the University of California, San Diego. One of my areas of focus was extended vocal techniques. I was a member of our research group, the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble. Because of the shared interest in extended vocals, Julius and I had more contact. In 1975, UCSD was getting a new performing arts centre, and as a result, a large new music festival was planned. Naturally, pieces by the music faculty were featured. New works by Kenneth Gaburo, Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Jean-Charles Francois, and Pauline Oliveros, among others, were presented. Pauline’s contribution was a roughly 45-minute-long ritual opera, called Crow Two. One part of Crow Two (and it was a very large and complex piece) involved four didjeridu players placed at the points of the compass outside a large ring of the other performers. Paired up with the didjeridu players were four theatrical performers called “Heyokas” after the sacred clowns of Native American ceremony. I don’t remember who all of the didj players were, except for the fact that Ron Nagorcka (finishing up a year’s residency at UCSD) and myself were two of them. I also remember the identity of two of the Heyokas. Ron was paired up with our EVT Ensemble colleague, bass-baritone Phillip Larsen, and I was paired up with Julius, who Pauline had flown in from the East Coast to be part of the piece.
This part of the piece worked like this: the four didjeridu players were to play a drone for the duration of the piece. The four Heyokas, after a beginning pause, were to each try to distract their assigned didjeridu player and try to break their concentration, by any means, except actual physical contact. I remember that both Julius and Phillip doing all sorts of extreme improvised movement and sound performing – up close and personal with us – to try and distract us. It became a real contest of wills between the didj – Heyoka pairs. (And remember, this is just one element of a very complex piece.) And I remember that it became a really serious contest between me and Julius. He tried every trick in the performance-art book (except for physical contact) to distract me. I was determined not to be distracted. We egged each other on to heights of absurdity. Since there was so much happening, I wonder if anyone else was aware of our struggle. The piece ended, and I had not been distracted (that is, I hadn’t stopped playing my drone) by Julius. We looked at each other as the applause was dying down, and simply fell into each other’s arms, laughing. This was a true high point for me in my performing career.
After this festival, I moved to Australia. In late 1976-early 1977, I found myself in New York City on a break from my teaching in Australia. I noticed that Julius was going to be playing a solo concert at Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation performance space. I was lucky enough that my time in New York coincided with his performance. Naturally, I went. Julius and I were very glad to see each other. His performance consisted of two parts. The first – about 40 minutes long, involved him singing, unaccompanied, an improvised vocal line. I remember the improvised text had lines in it like “To know, to know the difference, to know the difference between, to know the difference between the one and the two….” each line being repeated many times. The full range of his voice, from basso profundo, to squeaking high falsetto was used. The intensity of his solo singing, and the vulnerability of it, were quite striking. After forty minutes, he stopped, and after a brief pause for breath, went over to the electric piano, and proceeded to attack the piano with some of the highest energy improvising I had ever heard. The only other piano performer I had ever seen do anything like that was Cecil Taylor. It was an amazing performance. Shortly after this, Phill had arranged that all the performances at the XIF would be recorded. But this performance was before he had started that. However, I had asked Julius if I could record his performance on my cassette recorder. He said he was happy for me to do this. The recording of that evening became one of my prized musical possessions. Many years later, after Julius’ tragic early death, Mary Jane Leach began a project to collect performances of Julius’s with an ear to releasing them on New World Records. I immediately sent her a copy of my recording. To my disappointment, she said she found the technical quality of the recording to not be of a high enough standard to be included in the album. On listening to the recording since then, I sadly came to the conclusion that she was right. However, this was a period when Julius was doing a series of piano and solo vocal concerts. In early 1980, Julius gave a concert in Zurich, and this recording WAS considered of high enough quality to be released, so those of you who wish to hear the kind of work he was doing then can listen to “The Zurich Concert” on New World Records. This performance is much more oriented to his piano playing than his voice work, although there are moments of his vocal work during the performance.
My next time in New York was in 1979. Ned Sublette, a friend from UCSD days, who now was living in New York, told me that Julius was giving a concert at the Third Street Music School Settlement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was advertised as “The N***** Pieces.” There were three pieces, “Dirty N*****,” “Crazy N*****,” and “N***** Faggot.” Naturally, Ned and I had to go. The pieces were each staged in a small theatre in the round. Each piece consisted of several small ensembles of similarly timbred instruments, playing, fairly intensely, repeating loops of material. The final piece of the evening, “N***** Faggot” had four snare-drums in the four corners of the hall, and two piccolos, and I have a memory of a small ensemble of strings (though that might be a mistaken memory). I remember the snare-drums getting louder and louder, and then the piccolos came in, shrieking in their top register (and I think I remember that they were equalized to emphasize the high frequencies as well). Just when you thought it couldn’t get any louder, the fire alarm went off. A very loud bell-like alarm. (I’m not sure if this was planned or not.) It continued, and the piccolos and snaredrums continued for maybe 10-12 minutes, then they all stopped together. Our ears continued to ring for several minutes. Again, it was an extreme gesture (in fact the concert was three extreme gestures), delivered with high energy and completely uncompromising intensity. An unforgettable evening, one that one was unable to discuss with one’s friends in polite society.
I ran into Julius a couple of times after that. Mostly on the streets of New York, on my rare visits there. I remember some pleasant interchanges, but nothing of any profundity. I knew he was going through some hard times – I had heard this from a number of friends. I never had an opportunity to hear him perform or present his music again. When I heard from Joel Chadabe that he had seen Julius just a few days before his death in 1990, I was greatly saddened to hear how his life had unravelled. I was very relieved when I heard from Mary Jane Leach that she was trying to reassemble a collection of Julius’s work – that which had survived. Enough has survived, so that events like this one can indeed take place. But for those of us who knew him, the work, in all its intense energy, serves as a reminder of a bright spark of a human being, one who gave us a lot of light, and love in his work.
A young Warren Burt - San Diego, 1975. Photograph by Roberto Laneri.
