Julius Eastman: Femenine

Tuesday 2 April 2019

From time to time, the legend of Julius Eastman – tragic decline, obscurity, posthumous elevation to musical martyrdom – threatens to overshadow his achievements. He hasn’t quite attained the bedroom poster status of Che or Jim Morrison, emptied of meaning to become a vessel for the idolator’s own fantasies, but it’s important to get back to the music and refocus. Learning to hear it over again reminds you why his story has gained such renewed attention, and that his significance as a musician is still in flux.

Appreciating Julius Eastman’s music has been an act of recovery. Most Eastman fans probably first heard of him through the 3-CD set Unjust Malaise from 2005, the result of Mary Jane Leach’s quest to track down surviving remnants of his work. Another major step in this process was in 2016 when Frozen Reeds issued a tape of the large-scale ensemble work Femenine that had lain dormant for 40 years. For most of us, as listeners, the foundations of our knowledge of Eastman’s work has been through salvaged recordings that are part music and part historical artifacts.

What we heard was a lost strand of minimal music that was never fully pursued; a unique, vital voice in a style of composition that had seemed exhausted. Since then, new performances and recordings have started to appear, both premiering previously unknown works and reviving the inadvertent ‘classics’. At their best, these new interpretations reveal that those old tapes are merely scratching the surface of what can be found in even his most familiar pieces. The London Contemporary Music Festival in 2016 was dedicated to Eastman. At those concerts I heard that “When performed live by musicians who are not just skilled but are more sympathetic and knowledgeable than could be hoped for from a previous generation, the pieces took on a new life, with greater emotional depth and pure sensory delight than can be found in the old tapes.”

In that first LCMF concert, Apartment House gave the UK premiere of Femenine. That performance was recorded and is now commercially available on a new CD from Another Timbre. Their version benefits from greater accuracy and confidence compared to the 1974 tape of the SEM Ensemble, which allows the piece’s increasingly outrageous digressions to hit the listener with an tremendous force.

I’ve discussed the gig before and gone into more detail about Femenine in a review in Tempo. At first, the piece bears a superficial resemblance to Terry Riley’s In C, but Femenine evolves in a less predictable and more dramatic way. The musicians in Apartment House move from one figure to the next, sometimes together as a pack, at other times striking out individually or unexpectedly falling back. The relatively modest-sized ensemble take Femenine on a journey, making it expand, then soar, then self-sabotage with mock heroics, turn in upon itself and then recover and plough on ahead, stronger than before.

Eastman was an artist who refused to let himself be confined by the listener’s expectations, or by the logic implied the foundations for each of his pieces. His music repeatedly shows a desire to rebel against its own structures and is at its most powerful when the contrasting impulses to either transcend those constraints or destroy them combine to create the sense of a dramatic narrative, the meaning of which can never be fully resolved. Apartment House exploit these qualities to great effect, sounding both passionate and emotionally cool, depending on where you focus your attention. Recordings of mixed ensemble pieces that survive from Eastman’s lifetime seem relatively dry by comparison. Femenine is an essential work and, as significant as the 1974 version is, this new release has become the reference recording.