A ticket for the concert by S.E.M. Ensemble / Collectif Faire-Part on Fri 19 or Sat 20 Jan gives free admission to this lecture.On the occasion of the Downtown New York festival, we invite Isaac Jean-François to give a lecture on the life and work of Julius Eastman. Jean-François is a researcher at Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut). He is currently a doctoral student within the joint African-American studies and American studies programme. His research interests include black studies, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, queer theory and sound studies. His research on composer Julius Eastman was published in the journal Current Musicology in an essay entitled:
Julius Eastman: The Sonority of Blackness Otherwise (2020). Jean-François’s lecture will facilitate an active listening to Eastman’s musical influences. Known references will accompany imagined ones as they situate Eastman’s corpus within a vibrant musical environment. The talk will focus on Eastman’s compositional and curatorial art, an art which entangles listeners in his unique sonic and social aesthetic. His striking accounts of race, gender, and sexuality shake the musical canons he disrupts and invite new interpretations of older and unlikely genres that enliven his aesthetic world.