When an artist makes something, I think there is always a twinkle of hope that it might outlive them. That the work they've labored over, either on its own, or taken as a part of a larger body, might contribute to an endearing legacy of some kind. I don't think this is the case for most artists and artworks, though. If my experience working with, and admiring, the unsung and underdog has taught me anything, it's that most works are DOA and sink to the bottom of a cultural memory hole within days of their debut. This fate almost never correlates to the quality of the work either- some masterworks are suffocated by the sands of time, while egregious offal tends to rise like rancid cream. In an attempt to salvage at least one great work from death by neglect, the LA ensemble Wind Up has taken it upon themselves to record and release their interpretation of composer Julius Eastman's Vol 1: Femenine. And I'm pretty glad that they did.
Vol 1: Femenine is from the middle period of Julius's career and was written for a chamber ensemble prior to his penning his most well-known works Dirty N*igger and Gay Guerilla, and represents his "organic music" approach to writing and performing. "Organic music" as it informs Julius's writing and vision, represents an emphasis on repetition, wherein a piece builds and evolves through the recitation of specific phrases, ultimately leaning into the iterative potential of short sequences of notes in order to form the basis of more complex motifs while transforming the meaning of the core phrase itself in the process. Julius was also one of the first composers in the '70s to incorporate elements of popular music into their scores, working closely with artists like Arthur Russell, and contributing to his disco-infused Dinosaur L project. Vol 1: Femenine does not include many elements of underground dance or popular music though, and I mention this fact about Juliu's body of work only because I find it interesting and worthy of further exploration.
Unlike many struggling artists of his era, Julius actually enjoyed quite a bit of legitimate recognition and institutional support during his lifetime, although his temperament and artistic interests inevitably led to these ties to the stable world of academia to fracture. He may have had his work written up in the New Yorker, but this could not rescue his career from the ravages of its own excess, including one infamous incident involving nudity and insinuate,d homoerotic subtexts during a performance of John Cage's Songbook which incensed Caeg himself and forced Julius to leave a professorship teaching theory in Buffalo in 1975. Things spiraled from there with Julius turning to drugs to cope with a dearth of professional opportunities, losing touch with friends and family while in the throttle of his descent. Julius would die in 1990 with most of his manuscripts and compositions discarded in a dumpster by a disinterested landlord and police. No public notice of his death would be recorded until an obituary ran in the Village Voice in 1991.
Now Wild Up has taken pains to recreate one of Julius's more hopeful and representative compositions, and I am thankful that they made the effort and committed the sweat dividend to do so. It is not only a lovely suite of sound and emotion, but one that carries with it a promise; that one's passions are not simply the exhaust of their ego, expelled and dispersed into the atmosphere as droplets of moister that dwindle into something less than hot air before they even reach the ground, but instead, something that can be condensed, retained, and reproduced for the benefit of others, and the preservation of which allows the fruits of one's mind to germinate in evergreen cycles. I think this is the dream for most artists, and I'm glad to see Julius's work finding a home in contemporary hearts and minds in just such a way.
