writing and research
This Thread on Which We Move: Julius Eastman’s Queer Experimentalism in the margins of minimalism (2021)
Julius Eastman was a prolific experimental artist based in Ithaca and New York City in the mid to late 1900s. A grammy-nominated vocalist, highly sought after pianist and improviser, and an imaginative composer, Eastman's oeuvre has remained at the fringes of the minimalist, avant-garde, and experimental movements teeming out of New York City's downtown scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, despite being a member of the Creative Associates and the S.E.M. Ensemble at SUNY Buffalo during the height of its status as a new music hub, connections with the New York City downtown scene, and collaborations with renown composers, conductors, and performers, Eastman has remained no more than a footnote in the canon, if mentioned at all. Some scholars attribute Eastman's erasure to his intersectional identity as a Black, Gay man situated within the confines of the largely-white avant-garde of the mid-1900s, a claim supported by critical theorist Fred Moten's assertion that the avant-garde canon is “a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black" in his book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.
This paper seeks to unpack Moten's proclamation that the avant-garde is not only exclusively Euro-American, but "necessarily not black" through the lens of Julius Eastman corpus, querying what makes the avant-garde canon specifically "not black,” how sexuality, when coupled with race, plays a role in the erasure of Black voices from the Western canon, and how uncovering these answers can inform our analysis of Eastman’s work. By engaging the work of queer, social, and critical race theorists Jose Muñoz, David Halperin, Michel Fouclault, James Snead, Robert L. Douglas, and musicologist Ryan Dohoney, this paper will contend with the complications of conceptual boundaries between genre delineations and the practices of composition and improvisation. Confrontation of these boundaries will reveal that the erasure of Black voices, generally, and Julius Eastman's racialized queer experimentalism, specifically, is, in-part, rooted in the hierarchical framework erected by these conceptual boundaries, thus producing the “necessarily not black” canon of the avant-garde. This critique is rooted in conceptual and detailed musical analyses of Julius Eastman's musical output, with an emphasis on his 1973 work, Stay On It, situating Eastman's work in the praxis of disidentification and defining it as a racialized queering of the avant-garde rooted in the margins of minimalism.
A Comprehensive Analysis of Movement 1 of Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto (2018)
Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962) is quickly becoming one of the most performed and sought after American composers of our time. Her works have been played by all major American orchestras, along with several major European orchestras. As a Pulitzer Prize and multiple Grammy winner, she writes exclusively for commissions and her music is an audience favorite among concertgoers. The primary focus of this research is to investigate the first movement of Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto, addressing concerns of linear and contrapuntal development, along with the harmonic language employed in this movement, to prove that these traits are at the heart of Higdon’s compositional voice and are what make her works accessible, yet engaging.
The thesis will provide a formal analysis of the complete work, noting key elements of each movement and notable connections between the three movements. A formal analysis of the first movement will then be provided. Following these formal analyses, a discussion of pitch collection, voice-leading, motivic development, linear unfoldings and contrapuntal devices utilized in the first movement will be explored, including parallels between the movement’s title, 1726, and the pitch and intervallic content exploited throughout the movement. Lastly, Higdon’s harmonic language will be examined, with discourse regarding the use of triadic figures, polychords, and planing.
Embodied Encounters: Sound as an Evocative Object
A reflection on Blackness and embodiment in the works of Julius Eastman and Amiri Baraka