Mary Jane Leach is a composer and freelance writer, currently writing music and theatre criticism for the Albany Times-Union. Renée Levine Packer's book This Life of Sounds: Evenings for New Music inBuffalo received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence.
The book presents an authentic portrait of a notable American artist thatis compelling reading for the general reader as well as scholars interested in twentieth-century American music, American studies, gay rights, and civil rights. In addition to analyses of Eastman's music, the essays in Gay Guerrilla provide background on his remarkable life history and the era's social landscape. These episodes are examples of Eastman's persistence in pushing the limits of the acceptable in the highly charged arenas of sexual and civil rights. Eastman's provocative titles, including Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and others, assault us with his obsessions.Įastman tested limits with his political aggressiveness, as reflected in legendary scandals like his June 1975 performance of John Cage's Song Books, which featured homoerotic interjections, and the uproar over his titles at Northwestern University. His music, insistent and straightforward, resists labels and seethes with a tension that resonates with musicians, scholars, and audiences today. A compelling portrait of composer-performer Julius Eastman's enigmatic and intriguing life and music.Ĭomposer-performer Julius Eastman (1940-90) was an enigma, both comfortable and uncomfortable in the many worlds he inhabited: black, white, gay, straight, classical music, disco, academia, and downtown New York.
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