Kai Schumacher, Patricia Martin, Mirela Zhulali & Benedikt Ter Braak - Eastman: Evil Nigger / Gay Guerrilla (Live) (2020) [Hi-Res]
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BAND/ARTIST: Kai Schumacher, Patricia Martin, Mirela Zhulali, Benedikt Ter Braak
- Title: Eastman: Evil Nigger / Gay Guerrilla (Live)
- Year Of Release: 2020
- Label: Neue Meister
- Genre: Classical
- Quality: flac lossless / flac 24bits - 96.0kHz
- Total Time: 00:50:11
- Total Size: 225 / 835 mb
- WebSite: Album Preview
Tracklist
01. Evil Nigger (Live)
02. Gay Guerrilla (Live)
He may have been an awkward fit, but he was one who had all the more to say for it. Born in 1940, composer Julius Eastman broke with convention time and time again. A gay African-American, he was not afraid to speak of his roots and his sexuality, as is clear from work titles such as “Evil Nigger” or “Gay Guerilla”. At the same time, integrity and a clear, honest acknowledgement of his identity were at the heart of Eastman’s idealistic message.
His music may best be filed under minimalism, even if he is strikingly different to composers such as Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Just like his personal background, Eastman’s music is radical in many ways, and with his highly confrontational nature, he himself was never really part of the contemporary music establishment. While living in New York in the 1980s, he also battled a serious dependence on drugs; the police evicted him from his apartment and simply threw all his possessions onto the street, which sadly also resulted in the loss of many of his compositions. Eastman lived on the streets in his final years and died at a Buffalo hospital in 1990, largely unnoticed by the public and his colleagues.
To this day, Eastman’s music has lost none of its unorthodoxy, its power, or its message, and to celebrate it, four pianists – Patricia Martin, Mirela Zhulali, Benedikt ter Braak, and Kai Schumacher – got together to perform “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerilla” on four pianos at the Moers Festival on 31 May 2020. The recording of this concert is now set to be released as an album on the Neue Meister label.
Julius Eastman himself had the following to say prior to the first performance of “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerilla”: “And what I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental. That person or thing that obtains to a basicness, a fundamentalness and eschews that thing what is superficial or, what can we say, elegant. So a nigger for me is that kind of thing which obtains himself or herself to the ground of anything. […] Guerilla is someone who is in any case sacrificing his life for a point of view and, you know, if there is a cause, and if it is a great cause, those who belong to that cause will sacrifice their blood, because without blood there is no cause. So therefore that is the reason that I use Gay Guerilla, in the hopes that I might be one if called upon to be one.” (Eastman’s spoken introduction to a concert at Northwestern University on 16 January 1980)
These words reveal that Eastman’s guerilla struggle for artistic integrity and human “basicness” included an acerbic rejection of “new music’s” conservative elite, from which he repeatedly estranged himself in the 1980s. His music gives performers great freedom of interpretation. “Gay Guerilla,” which could happily be reconstructed for posterity, for example, was originally composed for four pianos, a rather unusual grouping of instruments that for pianists in itself represents interesting repertoire. It also follows an extremely simple yet ingenious structure that Eastman himself termed an “organic principle”. Put simply, each new section of the work contains all the information from the previous sections but adds a new aspect to them. This information, in the form of patterns, consists of the smallest possible element, that of a single note, stoically repeated over and over again, very gradually producing a drone-like soundscape from the chords and harmonies as if in slow motion.
What attracted Kai Schumacher, one of the four pianists who performed Eastman’s “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerilla” at the Moers Festival, to perform the work? “From a performance perspective, what fascinates me most about the piece is the almost complete freedom you have within the structure. You see, Eastman didn’t write out the score from beginning to end; instead, he gives the players a certain number of patterns, which you can jump between at will. Depending on what the players decide, then, this produces wildly different sound structures, almost in the manner of an improvisation. In other words, the piece will never sound the same twice. And this personal freedom that each player has brings us back to a very fundamental aspect of music-making – the notion of listening to each other, reacting to each other, and the chance to come together to create something new in the moment of its performance.”
The album perfectly captures the uniqueness of this moment of collective music-making by the four pianists Patricia Martin, Mirela Zhulali, Benedikt ter Braak, and Kai Schumacher: a modern play of sound and an homage to a composer whose works were minimal in form but maximal in effect, who had a life of minimal possessions combined with outrageous behaviour.
Kai Schumacher, piano
Patricia Martin, piano
Benedikt ter Braak, piano
Mirela Zhulali, piano
01. Evil Nigger (Live)
02. Gay Guerrilla (Live)
He may have been an awkward fit, but he was one who had all the more to say for it. Born in 1940, composer Julius Eastman broke with convention time and time again. A gay African-American, he was not afraid to speak of his roots and his sexuality, as is clear from work titles such as “Evil Nigger” or “Gay Guerilla”. At the same time, integrity and a clear, honest acknowledgement of his identity were at the heart of Eastman’s idealistic message.
His music may best be filed under minimalism, even if he is strikingly different to composers such as Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Just like his personal background, Eastman’s music is radical in many ways, and with his highly confrontational nature, he himself was never really part of the contemporary music establishment. While living in New York in the 1980s, he also battled a serious dependence on drugs; the police evicted him from his apartment and simply threw all his possessions onto the street, which sadly also resulted in the loss of many of his compositions. Eastman lived on the streets in his final years and died at a Buffalo hospital in 1990, largely unnoticed by the public and his colleagues.
To this day, Eastman’s music has lost none of its unorthodoxy, its power, or its message, and to celebrate it, four pianists – Patricia Martin, Mirela Zhulali, Benedikt ter Braak, and Kai Schumacher – got together to perform “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerilla” on four pianos at the Moers Festival on 31 May 2020. The recording of this concert is now set to be released as an album on the Neue Meister label.
Julius Eastman himself had the following to say prior to the first performance of “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerilla”: “And what I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental. That person or thing that obtains to a basicness, a fundamentalness and eschews that thing what is superficial or, what can we say, elegant. So a nigger for me is that kind of thing which obtains himself or herself to the ground of anything. […] Guerilla is someone who is in any case sacrificing his life for a point of view and, you know, if there is a cause, and if it is a great cause, those who belong to that cause will sacrifice their blood, because without blood there is no cause. So therefore that is the reason that I use Gay Guerilla, in the hopes that I might be one if called upon to be one.” (Eastman’s spoken introduction to a concert at Northwestern University on 16 January 1980)
These words reveal that Eastman’s guerilla struggle for artistic integrity and human “basicness” included an acerbic rejection of “new music’s” conservative elite, from which he repeatedly estranged himself in the 1980s. His music gives performers great freedom of interpretation. “Gay Guerilla,” which could happily be reconstructed for posterity, for example, was originally composed for four pianos, a rather unusual grouping of instruments that for pianists in itself represents interesting repertoire. It also follows an extremely simple yet ingenious structure that Eastman himself termed an “organic principle”. Put simply, each new section of the work contains all the information from the previous sections but adds a new aspect to them. This information, in the form of patterns, consists of the smallest possible element, that of a single note, stoically repeated over and over again, very gradually producing a drone-like soundscape from the chords and harmonies as if in slow motion.
What attracted Kai Schumacher, one of the four pianists who performed Eastman’s “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerilla” at the Moers Festival, to perform the work? “From a performance perspective, what fascinates me most about the piece is the almost complete freedom you have within the structure. You see, Eastman didn’t write out the score from beginning to end; instead, he gives the players a certain number of patterns, which you can jump between at will. Depending on what the players decide, then, this produces wildly different sound structures, almost in the manner of an improvisation. In other words, the piece will never sound the same twice. And this personal freedom that each player has brings us back to a very fundamental aspect of music-making – the notion of listening to each other, reacting to each other, and the chance to come together to create something new in the moment of its performance.”
The album perfectly captures the uniqueness of this moment of collective music-making by the four pianists Patricia Martin, Mirela Zhulali, Benedikt ter Braak, and Kai Schumacher: a modern play of sound and an homage to a composer whose works were minimal in form but maximal in effect, who had a life of minimal possessions combined with outrageous behaviour.
Kai Schumacher, piano
Patricia Martin, piano
Benedikt ter Braak, piano
Mirela Zhulali, piano
Year 2020 | Classical | FLAC / APE | HD & Vinyl
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