Neutrals and Friends will perform several works by avant-garde composer and musician Julius Eastman Friday, July 24, 7 p.m, at the Emporium. Eastman died in 1990, and his work has experienced a resurgence over the last two decades following years of obscurity. (Archival photo)
‘An Evening of Julius Eastman’ with Neutrals and Friends— A lost voice returns at Emporium
- Published: July 24, 2026
Though avant-garde musicians aren’t usually household names, Julius Eastman’s name nearly disappeared entirely.
A Black, gay composer whose work skirted the edges of contemporary classical minimalism, pop, jazz and disco, Eastman often stood in flagrant defiance of the abstract tendency within avant-garde modes to separate sound from self, instead infusing his identities into every note.
When he died in 1990 at 49, Eastman’s music — and the self he had so boldly imprinted within it — faded into obscurity.
But within the last two decades, Eastman’s work has arisen again, discovered and reverently replicated by new generations of artists — including a group of local and area musicians — who are eager to bring the echoes of a unique voice back to life.
Neutrals and Friends will present “An Evening of Julius Eastman” Friday, July 24, at the Emporium.
The performance is organized by Evan Miller, local percussionist and host of WYSO’s experimental music program “The Outside.” Miller — who also organized a dozen-musician performance of minimalist Terry Riley’s composition “In C” at the Emporium last year — told the News this week that he hopes the upcoming Eastman-focused night of music will give local listeners an entry into a composer often omitted from the annals of the avant-garde.
“He’s one of the great composers of his time, and it’s past time that he’s recognized for it,” Miller said.
As with last year’s performance of “In C,” “An Evening of Julius Eastman” will feature an ensemble of a dozen musicians: Joe Berry, AJ Breslin, Luke Dennis, Rob Funkhouser, Billy Gruber, Aidan Hackett, Skyler McNeely, Miller, Dan Moell, Andrew Seivert, Nat Tracey-Miller and Chris Westhoff. Their instruments include vocals, piano, guitars, bass, violin and a heavy complement of percussion.
The centerpiece works for the evening will be “Stay On It,” first performed in 1973, and “Gay Guerrilla,” written around 1979. A smaller group will also perform Eastman’s “Joy Boy,” and Miller said the ensemble may round out the evening with work by composer and musician Arthur Russell, Eastman’s friend and collaborator in New York.
Miller said he first encountered Eastman’s music about a decade ago, when a friend organized a short Midwestern tour pairing “Gay Guerrilla” with Steve Reich’s “Four Organs.” Miller learned Eastman’s work in rehearsal for the tour, and said he “loved it immediately.”
“I had no idea that he was around at the same time that Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass and all these guys were around,” he said. “But the music is beautiful.”
Eastman was born in New York City in 1940 and grew up in Ithaca. He studied at Ithaca College and the Curtis Institute of Music, graduating from Curtis in 1963 with a degree in composition. In Buffalo, New York, Eastman joined the Creative Associates at SUNY, became a founding member of the S.E.M. Ensemble. He composed “Stay On It” while a member of S.E.M., and later settled in New York City, where he moved between academic concert halls, experimental lofts and the city’s disco scene.
“Stay On It” begins with a bright, repeated riff with clear pop sensibilities, with the sung refrain of “stay on it” emerging at intervals above the riff. As the piece moves through cued sections, the central pattern is embellished, sped up, interrupted and stretched.
“I’ve been describing it as ‘chamber music disco,’” Miller said.
The surviving version of the work was reconstructed from partial materials and recordings; Eastman’s original score has been lost. AJ Breslin will read a poem by Eastman that was included with surviving performance materials before launching the ensemble into the vocal refrain.
The open instrumentation and improvised sections give performers freedom as the central riff starts to fray and dissolve about a third of the way into the piece; around fixed points, Miller said, the performers will make choices unique to their performance.
“It’s madness at parts of this piece,” Miller said. “It becomes like free jazz at some point. … What you can bring into the parts where it all falls apart is wide open.”
By the 1970s, Eastman was incorporating his Black and gay identities into his work. He brought unscripted queer theatrical material into a 1975 performance of John Cage’s “Song Books,” undressing a male volunteer on stage. The performance earned Eastman a public rebuke from Cage and, as biographers have written, likely hastened his effective expulsion from academic and professional music circles. Even the ostensibly open-minded experimental music world couldn’t open wide enough, it seemed, for the totality of Eastman.
In a recorded 1980 performance at Northwestern University — just a year before he would be evicted — Eastman debuted a trio of pieces for four pianos with titles intended to challenge audiences: “Evil N—-r,” “Crazy N—-r” and “Gay Guerrilla.” As he said during the recorded performance: “These names: either I glorify them or they glorify me.”
Though “Gay Guerrilla” was originally performed by four pianists, Neutrals and Friends will expand the piece across keyboards, guitars, violin, bass and percussion. The nearly half-hour piece begins quietly, pulsing slowly through a series of percussive patterns like a steadily approaching wall.
“‘Gay Guerilla’ has this really kind of emotional thread to it that I think is absent from a lot of similar work at the time,” Miller said.
About two-thirds of the way into the piece, the melody of Martin Luther’s Reformation hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” emerges, with musicians taking up the melody in turn before returning to the work’s forward movement. As it heads toward its resolution, “Gay Guerrilla” throbs with a clear sense of determination.
Miller said he plans to play for the Emporium audience a portion of Eastman’s 1980 Northwestern speech, in which the composer said: “A guerrilla is someone who is, in any case, sacrificing his life for a point of view. And, you know, if there is a cause — and if it is a great cause — those who belong to that cause will sacrifice their blood because, without blood, there is no cause. So, therefore, that is the reason that I use ‘Gay Guerrilla,’ in hopes that I might be one, if called upon to be one.”
“Being willing to lay yourself down for something has really stopped being prescient,” Miller said. “Eastman being Black and gay — it’s never not been difficult to be either of those things, but even among kindred spirits in ‘70s New York it was still very hard to be those two things, especially at once.”
By the early 1980s, Eastman’s professional opportunities had waned, and he struggled with drug dependency and housing instability. After an eviction, some of his scores and personal belongings were impounded, and others were lost or discarded. He returned to Buffalo some time before dying at Millard Fillmore Hospital on May 28, 1990. By then, he had been largely forgotten by his contemporaries; it took nearly a year for news of his death to garner an obituary.
The return of Eastman’s music in the 21st century has depended on those who knew him and on performers willing to work from incomplete scores and archival recordings. Composer Mary Jane Leach helped locate and preserve his surviving work, and aided the release of the 2005 collection “Unjust Malaise” — an anagram of “Julius Eastman” — centered on the 1980 Northwestern performance, bringing some of his recordings to new listeners.
“I think it’s really good that he’s starting to be acknowledged in the history and in the canon properly now,” Miller said, adding that Eastman had been making brilliant music alongside the celebrated white composers whose names have defined the era.
“He was just kind of lost to time for a little while,” he said.
Neutrals and Friends will present “An Evening of Julius Eastman” Friday, July 24, beginning at 7 p.m. at the Emporium. Admission is $5. The performance is supported by the Emporium and Mad River Theater Works.
Contact: chuck@ysnews.com
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