Watch: Lesson From the Life and Music of Julius Eastman

This past February, Stanford Live collaborated with Hans Kretz in the Stanford Department of Music and new music ensemble Wild Up to put together a course and concert around the music of Julius Eastman. We followed the creation of the course, students in rehearsals, and the lessons learned through diving into the life and music of Julius Eastman.

The course featured guest lectures from the following artists and scholars: Marisol Montalvo (soprano, creative artist, and educator), Christopher Rountree (Artistic Director of Wild Up), Jessie Cox (composer, drummer, scholar), Isaac Jean-Francois (scholar of Black Studies and Queer Studies), and George Lewis (composer, performer, and professor of American Music, Composition & Historical Musicology at Columbia University).

About Julius Eastman
A provocateur of the New York contemporary music scene of the 1970s and ’80s —his motto was “to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.”– Julius Eastman was a pioneer of minimalist techniques, one of the dominant aesthetic movements of post-war contemporary music. He nonetheless died in obscurity and poverty in 1990, at age 49; decades later, Eastman’s music is enjoying a renaissance as his scores have been unearthed and enterprising performers have devoted themselves to realizing his uncompromising vision.