Amazingly, composer Mary Jane Leach now has all of the late Julius Eastman’s available scores up as PDFs online, including the much-rumored symphony which, in predictable Eastman style, is titled Symphony No. 2. Good luck deciphering them. There is also a cleaner, annotated score of Crazy Nigger, significantly easier to read, made by Dutch composer-pianist Cees Van Zeeland, who arranged a performance of the piece this spring. I also have in my possession my own arrangement of Gay Guerilla for nine guitars, which I would be happy to send a PDF of to interested parties. It’s an amazing musicological feat for a composer whose scores were thrown out into the street in the 1980s by the sheriff who evicted Eastman from his apartment, sending him to live in Tompkins Square Park. Those of us who mourned Eastman’s death thought none of that music would ever be seen or heard again.
A Triumph of Musicology
On an unrelated note, allow me to point out the advertisement to the right of this page for the upcoming Hula performance at Symphony Space. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? At least click on it and look, for after a few thousand clicks I begin to make the first money I’ve made for the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written on this blog. If enough people click, maybe I won’t end up living in Tompkins Square Park myself!