Essay: Generation Loss

Generation Loss

On the Concert Program

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most prominent leader of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, was shot dead at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Less than a month later, Italian composer Luciano Berio premiered O King for mezzo-soprano and five instruments at Bowdoin College in Maine. His program note stated: “…this short piece is a tribute to the memory of Martin Luther King. The text simply consists of the enunciation of the black martyr’s name. The words and their components are submitted to a musical analysis, which is integrated into the structure of the piece. The voice enunciates the different phonetic elements of the name, which is gradually recomposed towards the end: “O Martin Luther King.”

Berio would later orchestrate O King and insert it into his magnum opus, the five-movement Sinfonia composed in 1968–69 and commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Sinfonia, an inimitable laboratory of musical and extra-musical referencing and political and topical engagement, succeeded in bringing Berio’s elegy to Martin Luther King, Jr. to a wider audience.1 With quiet forcefulness, O King memorializes the man who sought to bring about social and political change for African Americans, challenging the United States of America’s structure of racial discrimination and segregation—a legacy of slavery—through nonviolence and civil disobedience.

At around the same time, Alvin Lucier created his unobtrusively countercultural piece of sound art, I Am Sitting in a Room. One could hardly call this experimental work “music composition”; it is more of an installation than anything else. This is a work of contemplation, repetition, and listening that functions through a simple ploy: a recording of Lucier reading a text is played in the concert

venue; the recording is played back into the space and re-recorded; the new recording is played back, which is then re-recorded; the process is repeated. Eventually, in playing and re-recording and playing and re-recording, and so on, the text of the original object copied becomes unintelligible, overwhelmed by the resonant frequencies of the space. The purposefully mundane text Lucier reads is—in and of itself—a description of the process (it can be found on page 67).2

I Am Sitting in a Room is often conjectured to be the first work that explores generation loss, the loss of quality between subsequent copies of data.3 In the midst of the political and social turmoil of the late 1960s, Lucier turns inward, creating what Tom Parkinson describes as “perhaps the most profound statement about what it is to be human and have ears that has ever been produced.”4

Julius Eastman died on May 28, 1990 at the age of 49, alone in Buffalo, New York at the Millard Fillmore Hospital. The composer’s death was so obscure that the first obituary to honor him appeared eight months after he died. Eastman occupies something of an improbable position in late–20th century American music. Being an out gay African American composer whose music and performance was wrapped up in his identity, Eastman outwardly provoked—in his music and presence—the establishment and culture industry on which he was dependent.

Studying piano and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music, Eastman came to prominence in the 1970s as a composer and singer. With his authoritative and nimble baritone voice he recorded Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King on Nonesuch in 1973; this led to a performance of the same piece with Pierre Boulez at Lincoln Center in 1976. In 1970, Eastman was a founding member of the S.E.M. Ensemble for contemporary music and joined the Creative Associates (a stipendiary position with no teaching obligations) at SUNY Buffalo’s Center for the Creative and Performing Arts.

After running afoul of John Cage during a performance of his aleatory Song Books in which Eastman undressed a young man onstage, Eastman left Buffalo and moved to New York City for the remainder of the 1970s and into the 1980s, touring across the United

States and Europe and enjoying a residency at Northwestern University in 1980. There, he premiered three works for four pianos that represent a musical-political apotheosis of his post-minimalist compositional style: Evil Nigger [sic!], Crazy Nigger [sic!], and Gay Guerrilla. 5 These are the works with which Eastman is most associated today, and they are works of majestic drive and feverish energy with a striking performative quality of both uniformity and individual personality.

The compositional characteristics of those Northwestern University works spill into The Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc for single voice and The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc for ten cellos. Eastman attempts to confront the authoritative power of government and religion through insistent, repetitive, semi-tonal lyricism. His words echo Frantz Fanon’s fear of zombies, calling these works, “… a reminder to those who think they can destroy liberators by acts of treachery, malice, and murder… Like all organizations, especially governments and religious organizations, they oppress in order to perpetuate themselves. Their methods of oppression are legion. But when they find that their more subtle methods are failing, they resort to murder. Even now in my own country, my own people, my own time, gross oppression and murder still continue.”

After the premiere of The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc at the Kitchen in New York City in 1981, Eastman began to spiral. Locked out of professional opportunities, he became dependent upon drugs and was evicted from his East Village apartment with his compositions confiscated and thrown out by the New York City Sheriff’s Office. His last hope for a professional position, a lectureship at Cornell University, failed to materialize.

A victim of the system he sought to confront, Eastman spent his last years drifting in and out of homelessness, living on the margins of society. Thanks to the work of those who have painstakingly collected and transcribed his music,6 there is a renewal of interest in his work, an interest that is—hopefully—in the words of Hilton Als, accompanying “a largely white male avant-garde that’s learning to make room for other stories, and other visions.”7

—Prof. Dr. Mena Mark Hanna

1 Sinfonia, which weaves together Claude Levi-Strauss’s theories on mythology, much from Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel The Unnamable, graffiti from the 1968 Paris protests, stage directions by the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and—perhaps most stunningly and controversially—nearly the entirety of the third-movement scherzo from Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (along with countless more musical references), prefigures postmodernism in its extramusical engagement and selfreferencing. 2 The “irregularities” of speech to which the text refers to is Lucier’s stutter. One could conjecture that Lucier’s slow, measured reading of the text recorded is out of an attempt to avoid a stutter. 3 There have since been countless artistic experiments exploring generation loss.

Perhaps the most visually and aurally bizarre is “VIDEO ROOM 1000”, wherein a YouTube user “ontologist” applies generation loss one thousand times through uploading and ripping a self-recorded video to YouTube: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=icruGcSsPp0 4 Parkinson, Tom: “Sitting in a Room with Alvin Lucier,” in The Guardian, June 25, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/jun/25/sitting-in-aroom-with-alvin-lucier (last retrieved September 16, 2021). 5 I use “[sic!]” when quoting statements, terms, or titles of works that may be triggering or racist outside of the context specific to which I am writing. My intention here is not to patronize or discredit the titles of these works, but an attempt to qualify these terms within their own historical, cultural, and political context. I am also very conscious of the fact that Eastman titles his works in such a way as to specifically and intentionally provoke thought at the connection between those words, the history of their usage, and ideological structures and power structures which interdict or contradict upon the usage of those words. As he stated in his introduction to the premiere of these works at Northwestern University: “Now the reason that I use that particular word is because for me it has a, what I call a

‘basicness’ about it… what I mean [by this word]… is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that obtains to a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that thing which is superficial or, what can we say, elegant.”

See Hanson-Dvoracek, Andrew: Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency at Northwestern

University, MA thesis, University of Iowa 2011, p. 97. 6 Mary Jane Leach began the effort of collecting and saving Eastman’s music with her wish to perform The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc at Cal Arts in 1998. She has since been the main catalyst in renewing interest in Eastman’s compositions. With

René Levine Packer, Leach edited Gay Guerrilla. Julius Eastman and His Music, the authoritative biography of Eastman’s life. 7 Als, Hilton: “Avant-Garde Pioneer. The Work of an Overlooked Composer Gets

Unearthed at the Kitchen,” in The New Yorker, January 12, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/the-genius-and-the-tragedyof-julius-eastman (last retrieved September 16, 2021).