 You might recognize James Stewart as Vermont Public Classical's afternoon host. As a composer, he is interested in many different genres of music, writing for rock bands, symphony, orchestras, and everything in between. James received a Bachelor of Science in Music with an emphasis in composition from Takoa Falls College in Northeast Georgia in 2001. In 2007, James earned his Masters of Music in composition from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 2014, James received his Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Hart School of Music at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. He lives in Colchester with his partner Allison and four children, so he's a busy man. Please welcome James Stewart. Busy is correct. Thank you so much for having me back. I've talked at the E many times already, but this is my first time since the pandemic being able to see your face while delivering a lecture, so that is a great joy. It is really hard to do a lecture directly into your laptop camera in your basement, staring at it going, I have no idea if anybody's actually listening or paying attention. But thank you for being here. And also, thank you for being here on a gorgeous spring day in Vermont, which, as my co-worker Linda Radke will say, spring in Vermont is beautiful. Last year was on a Wednesday. It's a short period of time before summer hits, but I'm so glad that you're with us and with me. You can listen to me on the radio through Vermont Public Classical every weekday afternoon, except for this week because I took this week off, but from 3 to 7 p.m. And also, I'd like to invite you to check out Timeline, which is a podcast, also a radio feature that we put out that is all about the development of Western music. It's kind of how it began. We have over 200 episodes that cover a wide breadth of music history and music theory and musical concepts. The reason why I did it was when I was working on my DMA and getting my doctorate, I was also working as a tutor. And when I was getting people ready to take their oral and written comprehensives in music history, I would just have them take a sheet of paper and draw a line. And then I would tell them to put in everything they know in the music history, what eras and periods and composers and pieces that mattered. So what Timeline is as a project is basically walking you through my version of that Timeline. What is important? What composers stand out? And how can we follow along in this? And starting back in October, we released 10 different episodes of Timeline, all about composer Julius Eastman. And I'd like to invite you to check out that project at VermontPublic.org slash Timeline. Pretty easy to remember and easy to find. Also, thank you to everybody that's joining us via Zoom. I almost forgot. You're right there. Thank you. I want to make sure that you take a chance to listen and experience that project there at the website. What we're doing here this afternoon is more like a compendium to that content. So it's not like you're going to hear everything again. It's like I'm adding something to this whole dive into Julius Eastman and some of what this talks about. So again, that's VermontPublic.org slash Timeline. As we get started this afternoon, I want to say that there's a problem with the canon. What is the musical canon? It is this list of works that we are required in our music theory and music history and music appreciation. It is these groups of composers that we are asked to remember and that we then study. And as I like to write out, the classical canon is like a collection of pieces most often played and studied. It's sort of like the greatest hits of classical music. It's this curated list of quote-unquote important pieces and composers and works. It's a useful thing. It's very useful because when you talk about music, it's huge. And a canon allows you to be able to focus in on specific things like what's important? What is going to be in your textbook? Is this going to be on the test? Well, these will be. Now, we had a list of 200 works when I was taking my oral comprehensives for my doctoral studies. And each one had its own index card because I had to be able to recognize them by sight or by hearing. And so it was these index cards of what's important to listen to. It's like a museum. It's a museum of music. A museum of the musical works that you can explore. And just like a museum, it's curated. So someone else is deciding what is good and what is worth hearing and what is worth knowing. The bulk of all this curation of classical music started in the 19th century. And so when you look at our list, well, there's a problem. So this is what I did. I went to Google and I said, Google, show me a poster, a typical poster of the classical music canon. And these are the first two that came up for me. The first two posters of important musical composers throughout history. I want you to notice something about them if you can. Anybody see something interesting? You saw it right away. You saw it right away. Every single one of them. White men. There's also this very large poster that you can get for your classroom from Amazon. It covers an entire wall. And it goes, dives even deeper into music history. But every single photograph, every single name is of a rather wealthy white European man. This surprises no one. But we do have to ask ourselves why. Why are there only white male faces and names on this list? Is it because only white men composed? No. Because if you do any digging, you'll find that there are names and faces and music of a rich variety of individuals. A couple of years ago on Vermont Public Classical, we sat down and said that we wanted to expand our repertoire, expand our library, add more voices, add more people of color, add more women composers. It was going to be a large project because, yes, it is actually kind of hard to find, to find these works of women and people of color. And we found them, they're out there now somewhere easier to find than others, and some of the recordings come from you the long ago, archive recordings, or they were just released in the past couple of years. But there was a voice or two when we were making this particular push to add more diverse voices. There was a voice or two that said, aren't we concerned that the quality of our music will deteriorate? Aren't we afraid that the quality of the music is going to suffer? That was a real concern that was voiced in our meetings. The assumption is, if the music was good, wouldn't it have been noticed already? After years of research and listening, I found that that's not true. It's not true. There is great music out there by individuals that most people haven't heard of, and that just aren't being performed or played, and why is that? Why are some composers remembered and celebrated in others' art? I've been thinking about this issue for a while, and I had a couple of ideas. About a year ago, I wanted to do a project on Richard Wagner, a composer who's been gone for 150 years. I wanted to talk about the problems with Wagner's racial, political, and societal views and the way that his music has been used in the last 150 years. You know that Hitler was one of his biggest fans. I wanted to talk about what do we do with great art made by not great people? It was also a way to maybe address some of the horrible stories that have been coming out in the world of classical music. Recent years about contemporary figures that have tales of abuse and harassment. All of us are questioning what do we do? What do we do with this art? What do we do with it? So I worked on this Wagner project for a while, and I realized I didn't like what I was doing. I felt like I was just tearing someone down, or as my kids, and I have four, but as my kids say, throwing shade. And really, I don't want to think that way, and I don't want to do that. See, I like a lot of Wagner's music. I may not like a lot of what Wagner stood for, but I like a lot of Wagner's music. And I guess what I really wanted to do was make room. Make room for others. I'm going to get to Julius Eastman in just a moment, but I have a couple of other short stories of composers that I want to speak to about this problem with the canon. And a couple of months ago, I got an email from a Vermont public classical listener, who was a big fan of what we had done with the Julius Eastman project, and was asking if we could do something similar with another composer of color, the 18th century French composer, Joseph Ballon Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Anybody ever hear of Chevalier de Saint-Georges? A couple. Oh, there's a part of that story, because there's so many stories. Yes, maybe Marie Antoinette, but we'll get into that in just a second. Let me tell you about Saint-Georges. Saint-Georges comes from a wealthy family. His father, named George, George Saint-Georges. His father inherited a large coffee and sugar plantations in the First French Empire. This is where they established cities like New Orleans and Montreal. So that stretched all the way across to what is now Haiti and all the way. And Saint-Georges' father, George, ended up in a little bit of a fight with a man and injured him. We're assuming maybe with a sword. Injured his nose is what we know. They went their separate ways, but this injury became gangrenous, and the man died three days later. And Saint-Georges' father was condemned as a murderer, and he fled into exile. He fled to what is now modern-day Haiti. It didn't matter. They still tried him in Estencia and sentenced him and killed him in effigy. They hung his effigy, took away his title and everything else that was about him, and he went to what is now Haiti, took his wife, his daughter, and his mistress, which happened to be his wife's slave named Nanon. And while they were there, Joseph was born. Now, Joseph, a couple of years later, George, Joseph's father, was actually exonerated, and all of his name and title was re-established. And so with this newfound privilege and wealth that was brought back into the family, George sent Joseph back to Paris to study. And Joseph was a fantastic student and a fantastic athlete. He was great at just about anything he put his hands to, whether it be marksmanship, whether it be horse riding, but especially good at fencing, which was big at the time. And he was a fantastic fencer. There was one particular moment where he faced off against the big French champion Picard, and they were going to have a big duel in front of, you know, a big public duel, and they actually bet on who was going to win. The 17-year-old Chevalier des Saint-Georges, or this seasoned veteran. And what the betting really was about wasn't necessarily about young versus old or new versus, you know, it was more about the color of St. George's skin. So there was a whole push in France at the time for the abolition of slavery. And so those that were betting were betting on those lines. St. George cleaned his clock and won. His dad bought him a brand new horse carriage, buggy, basically like a brand new car. Now, in the middle of all of this, St. George was also a fantastic violinist. He studied with Jean-Marie Leclerc, one of the founders of the French violin school, and he also studied composition with Gossick. He directed many major orchestras in France and helped and commissioned and conducted the world premiere of Haydn's Paris symphonies. He was a friend of the Queen Marie Antoinette, and his star in Paris was Rising. So he was on the shortlist for the coveted position of artistic director of the Royal Academy of Music at the Paris Opera. This was the big time. This was going to be one of the biggest places that a composer or a musician could be in the country. However, the other artists, the singers, the divas, protested and appealed directly to the Queen. They said in their statement, quote, their honor and the decency of their conscience made it impossible for them to be subjected to the orders of a insert a deeply racist slur here about St. George's parentage and the fact that he was mixed race. It didn't matter what St. George accomplished or how skilled and talented he was. He would forever be marked. He could not marry somebody in his same stature, same social class. He couldn't hold a position of honor. He had come as far as he could go. And that's probably why he joined the French Revolution in 1789. Now, the French Revolution started with the promise of to abolish slavery. And St. George was appointed a colonel and led the first corps of light troops consisting of all colored men in Europe. The very first regiment of such. They nicknamed it lesion de St. George after him. However, the problems continued. He was accused of unrevolutionary behavior, whatever that means, stripped of his command and imprisoned for 18 months. When he was released, he was not reinstated. He was a vagabond for a few years. He even traveled to Haiti to fight in the Civil War there on the island. He died in 1799 in Paris. And even his own half-sister refused to acknowledge his existence. There's a new movie out right now. It's called Chevalier. And it gets some things wrong. Actually, quite a bit. Even in the trailer, you'll see that it starts off, you see Chevalier at a concert of Mozart's music in Paris. Where he challenges Mozart to a violin duo. He defeats Mozart in that duo. And you hear Wolfgang ask, who is that man? All right, this is inaccurate for a bunch of different reasons. First, Chevalier was 11 years older than Mozart. Mozart and Paris did not mix. Mozart actually had a lot of disdain for all of the French people. No one in Paris knew or cared much about Mozart. And Chevalier was the famous violinist, the world-renowned swordsman. He would have been much more well-known. And according to many accounts, Mozart was quite jealous of St. George. It's possible that the two worked together on the score of Mozart's ballet La Petite Rienne or Little Nothings. Some also say that Mozart stole some of St. George's melodies and called them his own. Still others say that Mozart used St. George's likeness as the basis for his evil character in the opera The Magic Flute. One of the only characters of Mozart's opera where he demands that it be played by a colored person. Why am I making such a big deal about this? Because if you know anything about Chevalier de St. George, he has a nickname. What's his nickname? Does anybody know? In every textbook I promise you they call him the Black Mozart. Then that's kind of what the movie's doing, isn't it? Why is it that we have to see his talent through the lens of another? Why do we have to compare St. George and Mozart at all? Isn't this part of the systemic racism that held him back even in his lifetime? And one particular biographer asks, why is Mozart the White Chevalier? Here's a little taste of Chevalier's music. So why is the music of this amazing musician almost completely forgotten? That was the question. There's actually a really easy answer. Actually, May 20th, 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery. This was after defeating an attempt of Haitian democracy. And so many biographers called this the second death of St. George. As one biographer described it, the second death. Because on the other side of Napoleon's reinstatement of slavery, all the work of people of color that showed serious artistic endeavor were dismissed or banished from thought. That's a quote from Napoleon. It's thought that as much as two-thirds of St. George's music was destroyed, including large operas and countless other treasures. So St. George was not forgotten. He was systematically erased. And I think that this distinction is very important because I've read many different articles about this composer. And they say something like, St. George wasn't the most prolific composer of this day, or something along the lines of, there were certainly greater composers than blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I feel that that's unfair. So much of St. George's legacy was stolen from us. We don't know how much music he actually composed. We don't know what works were destroyed. We cannot, in good conscience, make a blanket statement about St. George and his impact without that knowledge. And it's sad that the struggle that he had and felt at the end of the 18th century is still true for us in the 21st. No matter how much he achieved or how skillful he was, no matter how many articles or performances of his music that take place, the musical establishment still seems determined to keep him in the box of the Black Mozart. This is the same racism that was imposed by Napoleon, demanding that St. George be the slave of an Austrian master. Am I wrong? But you came for a lecture about Julius Eastman. All right. We'll get there. We'll get there. But first I want to tell you another story. A bit more recent. In 2009, in a broken-down abandoned house just outside of St. Anne, Illinois, dozens of musical scores and papers by composer Florence Price were discovered. In this forgotten treasure trove, there were two violin concerti, an entire fourth symphony left unperformed and forgotten. It's only been in the past decade that we've come to understand the genius and beauty of Florence Price's music. Price was born Florence Beatrice Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1887, she was one of three children from a mixed-race family. But in spite of racial prejudice, Florence's parents were well respected in their community. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a music teacher, introducing Florence to the piano. Florence was brilliant. She gave her first piano performance when she was only four years old, published her first composition at the age of 11. By 14, she graduated from high school as the valedictorian. Florence studied organ and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. And to avoid discrimination, she told people that she was Mexican. Not black. It made her interactions easier is what she said. At the age of 19, she graduated and taught music in Atlanta. She married lawyer Thomas J. Price and they settled back in Little Rock in 1927. Oh, sorry, back in Little Rock. And in 1927, the lynching of African-American John Carter led to a wave of mob violence and intense racial unrest. And the Price family decided to leave Arkansas as part of the Great Migration. As many of the citizens left the deep south. Florence and her family settled in Chicago. She began to take advantage of all the schooling available in that city, studying composition, languages, and art. In 1931, Florence ended her abusive marriage. Suddenly, a single mother she made ends meet by playing the organ for silent films and writing music for radio advertisements. She lived with friends including fellow composer Margaret Bonds. And through Bonds, she started friendships with Langston Hughes and Marion Anderson. A few years later, Florence Price won both the first and third prize in the Watermaker Foundation Awards for her symphony in E minor and her piano sonata. This led to a performance with the Chicago Symphony marking the first composition by an African-American woman played by a major orchestra. Price's musical style was connected to African-American melodies, spirituals, and rhythms, and many of her pieces were inspired or based on folk tunes. There's lots of different examples. A stroke took her life in 1953 when she was 66 years old and after her death, her music fell out of favor. To me, a lot of her music sounds like Aaron Copland. It has very much that kind of feel to it. Now, in Price's case, there was no Napoleon that sought to erase her music. Her works were simply forgotten and left in an attic. Not because there wasn't good music there, not because it didn't deserve to be heard or have life, it just... Well, I think we know the reason. But a promise we get to Julius Eastman. I was a young undergrad student at a conservatory and I was taking a course called Introduction to 20th Century Music, something like that. It had that kind of title. Inside were a whole bunch of works by 20th century composers starting with, like, Ravel and Debussy, which is almost 20th century. And then by the end, we were getting things by Crumb and Cage and those other kind of names. Somewhere near the back of the book, there was a piece called Eight Songs for Mad King by Peter Maxwell Davies. This is a setting of King George III quotes and it was out there. This was 60s. This was kind of craziness. And when I was reading through it, I saw these instructions in the music. It was all handwritten and rather sloppily handwritten and it had things like smoochy or break the violin here or like literally you're supposed to take a kind of play violin, throw it to the ground and stomp on it. It's fun. But I decided I had to learn more. I had to hear more and I wanted to listen and when I did, I heard something like this. When I listened to Country Dance, I was not prepared for what I heard. The music was playful and it was unsettling but that vocal performance was beyond description. Here was a performer that laid everything out there for the audience, literally destroying their voice for the sake of making you laugh, jump you out of your chair, kind of creepy out a little bit, especially there at the end. And it was my first introduction to Julius Eastman. That was him performing. And like many music students, I had barely heard of Eastman when I was in school. Beyond the recording of Eight Songs, all I knew was that Eastman had wrestled with addiction, had angry run-ins with other musicians, composers and the police and died penniless and homeless. And when I mentioned Julius Eastman to my professors, I'll never forget they told his story to me as a cautionary tale. Be careful lest you end up like Eastman. But his music tells a much richer story. And some of the folks in the classical world are just starting to really hear the music of Eastman for the first time in the past couple of decades, thanks to new books, releases of archive recordings. There's been a revival of Julius Eastman and the revival started for me with an email from John Kalaki. John Kalaki was a state senator. He also helped Ren the Flynn for several years and he wrote an article. And the article was called, Arts Appreciation Long Overdue, homage to Julius Eastman, fierce black queen iconoclast. That was the title. And with the title like that, I was like, yeah, I'll talk to you, let's find out more. I want to know more. John shared that he wanted to write the article because he really wanted to talk about the glory of Julius Eastman and not the tragedy. In 1976, Eastman was interviewed in the Buffalo Times and he said his aspiration was to be what I am to the fullest, black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest. And Eastman lived up to all three of those ideals. One of the benefits of talking to somebody like John Kalaki is that I got to hear what Eastman was like from a person with firsthand knowledge and not just from a Wikipedia biography. John and Julius' past crossed quite often. John would see Julius a lot in New York City in the 70s at performances and he also saw him at the gay clubs and he described him as this outrageous, outsized persona. But he had a lot of struggles. He had a lot of struggles in his life. He struggled economically to make a living. He struggled with substance use and in the mid-80s he was evicted from his apartment in New York for non-payment of rent. And the tragedy was they took all of his stuff, all of his scores, all of his recordings and they threw him out into the street. And Julius looked at them and said, I don't need them anymore. And walked away and started living in Hyde Park. He died in 1990, homeless and completely forgotten. I talked with another friend of Julius Eastman named Mary Jane Leach. She's a composer. She's also a native rematcher. And Mary Jane told me that when people found out that Julius had been evicted, they pulled together the resources and they got him the money to pay for his back rent. When they gave it to him, he ended up giving it to somebody else. So they needed more than I did. In 2005, Mary Jane Leach, an author, performer, composer, released a set of archive recordings of Julius Eastman's music entitled Unjust Malays, which happens to be an anagram of Julius Eastman. Unjust Malays? I thought that was fun. And in 2015, Leach wrote a book called Gay Gorilla. And that's a gay gorilla, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-I-A, the fighter. The Life and Music of Julius Eastman. It's also the title of one of Julius's glorious pieces. Mary Jane was getting ready to teach a course at Cal Arts. And Cal Arts had this big electronic music program going on where they were dealing with a lot of tape and a lot of instruments that were more like machines, right? And they wanted her to do a course on quote-unquote real instruments, okay? Your traditional instruments. And she was trying to come up with a list of pieces that she could use for this course. And she was like, oh, I want to find things for like five oboes and ten cellos. Well, Julius Eastman had a piece for ten cellos and it was called The Holy Presence of Joan of Arc. And the recording barely does a justice because imagine the ten cellos on stage all doing this together. And it evolves over time. We'll talk about his musical style in a second. He premiered in 1981 at the kitchen one of New York City's oldest nonprofit venues and she never found the score. In fact, a friend of Eastman said that he would use the pages of that piece of music to line his cat litter box at home. So with the score missing, Mary Jane turned to the performers because the performers that actually premiered that work were still around and she came to them and they happened to find a recording of that piece. And so she wanted to have that recording dubbed so that she could show it to her students. And this is back in the old days of like, you know, you have the dual cassette player where you play and then you record and you have to do it in real time, you have to sit there and listen to the whole thing. So she's sitting there with this other composer, the one who had the tape and the composer was telling her how all of Julius Eastman's music was gone. That's really sad. And then she went looking for a little bit more of his music and realized that it really had disappeared. And this sent her diving into all these different places, universities, places where his music had been played. Finding archive recordings and archive scores and piecing together as much of his music as she possibly could. And he was very prolific. She found enough for that three CD set on Just Malays and she thought that would be it. That would be the end of the project, right? Did my job. But that was just the beginning because unjust Malays was widely influential and was beginning of the revival of interest in his music and today musicians of all stripes and genres are diving into the music of Julius Eastman and realizing it in their own varied ways. I had a chance to speak with a new music ensemble called Wild Up. They're in Los Angeles right now. And as an ensemble they play everything. They play 20th, 21st century music. Ancient works, premieres. Their works like to ride between the lines of theater and performance and pop and classical. And they've committed to producing a seven part anthology of Eastman's music. The first two volumes have already been released the new Amsterdam Records and they were actually nominated for multiple Grammy Awards last year. And in fact just last week, my kid told me about this, just last week they released exciting new single, a sneak preview of volume 3. They were also just recently featured in the New York Times for their Julius Eastman concerts. Oh, that's fun. Let's try that again. Well, this is one of the pieces. It's a stay on it. Oh, there we go. Let's try it again. There it is. And like I said, there's multiple volumes of his music that's coming out and the style of his music is a kind of interesting unique take on minimalism. We start off with a very simple idea and then you build on it. We'll talk about that in just a second. That's just the taste of what musicians are doing with Eastman's music today. But I also had a chance to talk with somebody who knew Eastman's music at the time it was performed and recorded and was actually at a lot of those places and Kyle Gann was his name. Kyle Gann spent 19 years writing for the Village Voice between the ages between the years 1986 to 2005. The Village Voice was the only publication in the country that had a dedicated critic for just new and experimental works. That and Kyle said that means that I went to a lot of weird concerts is what he said. However, by the time Kyle started at the Village Voice, Eastman was already invisible. Now he said he joined the voice in 1986 and Eastman's Eastman hadn't performed since 83 so he kind of disappeared. Then about 89 in 1990 he happened to see Eastman in line at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in line for a performance and just happy to see him, went up and talked to him and hoped that he'd perform again and maybe get to write about him in the voice. However, he died soon after that and nobody knew. He heard a rumor that Eastman passed away. It was eight months later that he actually wrote an obituary. It was the first chance that he had to write about Eastman in the voice. Eastman dies and the tragedy is that nobody knows about it for months. Kyle said that Eastman's influence at the time he was active in New York City was huge. I asked him why he thought, well what he thought was bringing about this revival of interest in the music and life of Julius Eastman. And this is what he said. Julius' story really hit people. They really identify with it. He has relevance in a lot of worlds that don't exist with the classical music world. Early in his career Eastman made a name for himself as a performer of other people's music. He was invited to join the Creative Associates that's an avant-garde classical music program at SUNY Buffalo's Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. He had a financial stipend with very few strings attached and began creating his own music. Kyle Gann remarked that there was this huge wall that separated popular and classical music. You could not cross that line. But Julius brought a pop sensibility to so much of the music that he created earlier than anybody else would have thought to do it. And his music stood apart from a lot of the composers at the time. You know, you can think about the minimalist music that was taking place in New York City Philip Glass, Steve Reisch it's the kind of thing that was happening but Eastman wrote in many different styles he also was big into early disco. There's some really great recordings. But when he went to write pieces like Stay On It or The Holy Presence he was using what he called organic music and by organic he meant that well this is his exact words. What I call make organic music that is to say the third part of any part, the third measure or the third section, the third part has to contain all the information of the first two parts and then go from there. It's like the Fibonacci one, one, two, three, five. It just continues and grows. It's organic right? And you get results like this. So in minimalism in the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reisch it's all about slow change but organic music is additive. It's about layering new things on top of itself and growing. I like to think about it like like a fractal. Repeating patterns that evolve and shift with infinite complexity defined by simple rules. And I think that's why so many ensembles are being drawn to his music. They can interpret it in a whole bunch of different ways. And also John Kalaki said he just felt like it was just very, very joyful. So there's a lot of life and joy in Julius' music. However some of his titles say something else entirely. One of the members of Wild Up said that in Eastman's case he was always trying to be provocative in a strategic way. So he would sometimes take these beautiful pieces and he would put these titles to them that would catch your attention. And I'm not even comfortable reading these titles. Not being who I am. Julius Eastman shows he wasn't interested though in my comfort. He was not interested. Which is evident because he would use the n-word and sometimes he would use homophobic slurs. And it sometimes caused controversy like when he performed at Northwestern University in Illinois in 1981. There were three of his multiple piano pieces two of which used the n-word in the title. And there was controversy around that. The titles were censored and there were protests from student groups and the compromise that they came to is that he would get up on stage and speak about his titles. So here's Julius Eastman, this amazingly talented composer and performer who's boldly challenging classical and academic systems and forcing conversations of complex issues simply by the titles he chose. And it seems like Eastman was much more than a musician. I spoke with composer-activist Daniel Bernard Romain DBR. I don't know if you know him. He played the violin at the City Hall in Burlington and he's worked quite a bit with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra. And I asked him about Julius Eastman because he's worked with Julius Eastman's music quite a bit and this was one thing that he shared with me. I think he had real aspiration, frustration and aspiration. I think the thing that we share in common is that our title suggests a perspective an opinion, a better world, a landscape. All titles have certain information. All titles. I love this. They betray and reveal a certain privilege or posture. So even Sonata number one, you're saying something. All arts are political. All of them. All the arts are. Swan Lake political. In C, political. I think what Julius Eastman has done, and I see this as a challenge, that the titles challenge us, provide and provoke us, I would say to a deeper understanding, a kind of intimacy. Hopefully the piece delivers. You know? And that brings me to this thought that John Colacchi said. He observed his hope that the world of classical music that there might be seeking to write the canon, R-I-G-H-T. Now first, we have to recognize and like we said before, the canon is constructed. It's not divine. It doesn't come from on high. It's something that we've built. Secondly, we should ask, would Eastman even want to be in the canon? Is that a goal that's worth pursuing? Kyle Gannon stated, the current canon is more full of holes than Swiss cheese. And the canon needs to be shaken up every once in a while. So is there room for other music in this list of works that get performed so often? The third thing we must consider is that we do a disservice to the artists when we only look at a small percentage of their work that happens to be a little closer to the work that classical music establishment already does. This brings to mind this article that I read by musician Jace Clayton about the current resurgence of interest in Eastman's music. It's called, Reverence is a former forgetting. I wanted to make sure that I get this quote exactly right. First, we have to leave behind any idea of progress in canonizing Eastman alongside the positive enthusiasm about reconsidering Eastman lies a certain amount of performative wokeness. Eastman's face provides great optics to advertise an otherwise-stayed concert series of coming season. Reviving an unjustly malaise black gay talent who is no longer able to speak back to our many uses of him confers a kind of sideways ethical blessing to all involved but Eastman didn't die for our historiographic sins. Now that I've read and sung, who are we missing now? Good question. Wild Up had an answer to this. Their answer was spend time studying, rehearsing, and diving into the music. What they said was the only way to not disenfranchise this composer is to give it a lot of time. One of the Wild Up crew Richard Ballatudo said it this way, I'm curious to see in the attempts to write the canon in both senses with regards to Eastman, maybe that will fail, but in the best possible sense. We think what should happen is this thing over here with like, yay, we get to put this picture up with all next to all these other ones, and what will in fact happen is maybe that shelf with all those photos on it will be completely torn down and replace what they knew, something that holds all of these great experiences in music in a different way. And that's the idea that I'm really excited about. To tear down that shelf to change the posters of the classical canon and find a new way of giving space for different voices. To still recognize Mozart and Beethoven and the rest but let's make sure there's room in space for no erasures, no forgetfulness, no evictions. Imagine the impact on the world if you go in to a children's music classroom and alongside these faces you have Chevalier de Saint George, Florence Price and Julie Seisman alongside Mozart, Aaron Copeland and John Cage. This music doesn't just belong to long dead rich white men. It belongs to everyone. And if everyone could see themselves in it, see themselves represented in it, how would that change the perception of art form and enrich the future of music making? And that's the question I want to leave you with. Thank you. And I'd like to open up the floor to questions from you. I will do my absolute best. I can't promise that I know anything or everything, but we'll do our best. That's terrific. We love you. You always bring us such interesting. Now, Florence Price, haven't we, haven't I heard a symphony or a lane series playing some of her? Yes. There's been a huge resurgence of Florence Price in the last decade. And that's been phenomenal. She never got to see it. Any questions from people? Yes, sir. I'm not sure you told us where Julius Seisman was born and when he was born. He was born in Buffalo, New York Forgive me. He died at the age of 55 and 1990. I know three years before me. That's how I know. Other questions? I speaking personally I was raised on the canon and I thought your picture of the photos was good. That was cool. It's rather glaring there. My dilemma is when I sit and listen to that music and when I sit and listen to excerpts of the music of Seisman it's similar to some kinds of jazz as I think of the word jazz. That's another topic. I have a sense of, you know what if I in New York to go to this concert and I'm thinking, do I like this? Check the no box. I just don't like it. God forgive me, but I don't like it. I like your enthusiasm for trying something different and I like the fact that you say that everything musical or somebody else's quote is political but that's true about virtually everything. Exactly. Absolutely. And all things are social. You could say everything has an economic context but you get into the social sciences which is the same review. Absolutely. And history matters. I'll stick with that. The first person singular experience of saying to much music, not all of it by any means that new music in the last, say in the 20th century or beginnings of this one but I'm just curious how you respond to what I think of the artists who say I paid $200 for this ticket and I don't like it. How many people really love all the paintings ever done by Picasso? Picasso, the paintings. How many people love every single painting done by Picasso? Is Picasso a great artist that should be studied and appreciated? Yes. Do I have to like something to realize that it is worthwhile to be considered? No. In fact, look throughout history, even Mozart's music, if you look even at the movie Amadeus not that that should be the big pinnacle of, you know, histographic talk but if you look at the movie Amadeus what was, you know, criticized? Too many notes. There are quite a few people who talk the imagination of a new generation of people and that Wild Up group is all about finding something within that music that they can latch onto and bridging a gap between the popular world and the classical world bringing together and bringing more people across so that they're not just listening now to the music of Eastman, they're listening to the music of all these others as well. You're opening up a door where this art is about doing. So, you know, some of these pieces by Eastman aren't the ones that I would pick out and choose to listen to but I'm going to recognize the genius that's there and I'm going to recognize that other people are really enjoying it and see that enjoyment and see that importance and see that voice as worth putting my effort behind. Does that make sense? That's how I would respond. I would respond by saying that I am not the arbiter of what stays and goes. If that makes any sense. That is a good question because what that assumes is that there are people that aren't. What that assumes is that there are people that aren't born musical but I would argue the complete opposite. Every single one of you is a musical creature. I've had so many people come up to me and say well that was a lovely performance, that was a lovely talk about music, that this was all great. I'm just not musical. Do you realize that in another culture, many cultures across the world with you say I'm not musical that is akin to saying I'm not alive. There is no concept for that. Music comes out of our humanity. I was just talking with a couple of great music educators, the teachers at and Champlain Elementary School and what they tell me is they don't have to teach a 5 year old how to come in and sing a new melody. They don't have to teach them. They come in doing that. They come in singing songs about going to the bathroom. They come in singing songs about the color blue. They come in with that inside them in somewhere between the age of 5 and wherever we are right now that's been stifled because we've been told that there are people that are musical and people that aren't. We are all musical. All of us. And even if it's just to be able to recognize it and enjoy it, do you realize that we are the only primate on this planet that can do what we call rhythmic entrainment. We can listen to a piece of music and clap our hands along with it without seeing anybody else do it. There is so much that is innate in us in our musicality. So yes and no. But that what you feed is that which grows, right? That's correct. I'm just curious in your studies or just loving classical music do you know the name Santiago Cañón Valencia? Yeah. He's related in a way to my family but it's my daughter married into the family that he is a member of and they just are so proud of him. So I get clips or information and videos of him playing all over the world and I've learned to like it and I was never anyone who appreciates cello music. Didn't know about it so it's been fun. No. Thank you. Anyone else? Is there any questions over Zoom? I guess we wore them out in the annual meeting. Well this has been terrific. I always love that you bring us something we didn't know about because you're widening our horizons and that's what we want to do here at Triple E. Yay! Thank you, thank you. Thank you.