Pianists Melaine Dalibert, Stephane Ginsburgh, Nicolas Horvath and Wilhem Latchoumia perform music by Julius Eastman at CentroCentro, in Madrid.
Tomorrow Thursday, within the programme of the Vang festival held at CentroCentro, in Madrid, there will be a concert entitled Guerrilla Gay with Julius Eastman, in which four outstanding pianists from the French (Melaine Dalibert, Nicolas Horvath and Wilhem Latchoumia) and Belgian music scenes (Stephane Ginsburgh) will perform three of the most famous pieces for multiple pianos by the late American minimalist composer Julius Eastman (Ithaca, 1940-Buffalo, 1990), Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla. These three pieces were performed live by these same four pianists on 28 September 2019 at the famous Musica Festival in Strasbourg, a performance that was recorded and released in 2021 on the Sub Rosa label under the title Three Extended Pieces for Four Pianos.
As has been recalled on numerous occasions in recent years, in early 1982, Eastman was judicially evicted from his New York flat and all his belongings placed on the curb. Eastman left it all behind and spent the last years of his life composing sporadically while in and out of homeless shelters, until he died in May 1990 in a hospital in Buffalo, New York. Today, however, his name is fully recognised as one of the leading figures of the New York avant-garde music scene, both as a composer and singer (he is one of the most celebrated baritones for his performance of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ demanding Eight Songs for a Mad King, for which he was nominated for a Grammy), pianist and dancer, and his compositions have been revived by numerous ensembles and performers. In 1970 he met the Czech composer and flautist Petr Kotik, with whom he founded the S.E.M. Ensemble, a chamber music ensemble influenced by the subversive spirit of Fluxus. For this group, Julius Eastman produced Macle (1972), Joy Boy (1974) and Femenine (1974), compositions of a markedly minimalist character – coinciding in time with those of Philip Glass and Steve Reich – in which his gay identity was also evident. It was in 1979 that Eastman composed Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger and Gay Guerrilla, which are now considered his greatest works.