Ensemble 20/21: EASTMAN - Joy Boy

“What I am trying to achieve, is to be what I am to the fullest-Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.” -Julius Eastman
There never was and never will be another artist quite like Julius Eastman. No single category exists for a person of such complex creativity and humanity. A Curtis alumnus, he was pianist, singer, composer, dancer, activist, provocateur, creator, and collaborator.
The one-page score of Julius Eastman’s Joy Boy is dated October 31, and the year was 1974. Eastman was working at SUNY-Buffalo’s Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, the U.S. was reeling from the August 8 resignation of President Richard Nixon, the oil crisis was in full swing, and the country’s gay liberation movement was in its infancy. A year earlier, in 1973, the Nonesuch recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, featuring Eastman as the baritone soloist, had brought him fame in the contemporary music world. In 1975, the year after he composed Joy Boy, he turned away from what appears to have been a productive and creative six-year period in Buffalo, following a sexually explicit performance of John Cage’s Song Books and general disenchantment with academia.
One could say that the fluidity of Eastman’s life was reflected in the way he composed and conceived music. Commissioned by the Composers Forum, Joy Boy was brought to life in Albany, N.Y. by the S.E.M. Ensemble, of which Eastman was a member. Its score comprises general instructions rather than a detailed roadmap, in a kind of modern version of a baroque basso continuo. There is no specific instrumentation indicated and the most explicit instruction-“create ticker tape music” -comes at the very beginning. Online recordings and live performances of Joy Boy, including this one from Curtis’s 20/21 Ensemble, show it to be a captivating work, able to produce a gamut of sonic expressions from such simple and minimal notation in the score.
-Christopher Mossey
Learn more about this work: • Ensemble 20/21, Intro:...
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“modern baroque basso continuo” = chord changes lol