Talea Ensemble And Harlem Chamber Players Release Julius Eastman's 'Femenine'

The Talea Ensemble – comprised of sixteen bold and boundary-breaking musicians, with a mission to champion musical creativity, cultivate curious listeners, and bring visionary new works to life – together with the Harlem Chamber Players, today releases Julius Eastman's Femenine (arr. Chris McIntyre) on KAIROS. In collaboration with Harlem Chamber Players, Talea performs Femenine – one of four compositions written by Eastman in the early 1970s (Joy Boy, Femenine, Masculine, and That Boy) that invites us to listen beyond the mark of singular identity by blending improvisation with two lines that remain the same throughout the piece (vibraphone and Sleigh Bells).

The title Femenine is purposely misspelled with “e” replacing the fourth letter (“i”) in the traditional spelling of “feminine,” changing “-min-” into “-men-” to play upon and challenge the listener's preconceptions about traditional dichotomies. Columbia University music theorist Ellie M. Hisama and Isaac Jean-François, author of the essay titled, “Julius Eastman: The Sonority of Blackness Otherwise,” wrote, "Femenine stages Eastman's shaping and building of the black queer masculine form – caught not necessarily between two poles of gender, but with his work constantly driving his own self-making.” 

"The composer is therefore enjoined to accomplish the following: she must establish himself as a major instrumentalist, he must not wait upon a descending being, and she must become an interpreter, not only of her own music and career, but also the music of her contemporaries, and give a fresh new view of the known and unknown classics,” said Eastman in a quote for EAR Magazine.

Eastman's dual gendering of the composer, as “she,” “he,” “himself,” and “her,” and his shifting between personal pronouns within a single sentence is given life in sound in Femenine's continuous shifting of emphasis on pitch primacy and the stretching of the sound world from the opening motive.

About Julius Eastman

Julius Eastman (1940–1990) was a composer, conductor, singer, pianist, and choreographer. A singular figure in New York City's downtown scene of the 1970s and 80s, he also performed at Lincoln Center with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, and recorded music by Arthur Russell, Morton Feldman, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Meredith Monk. “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest,” he said in 1976. “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.” Despite his prominence in the artistic and musical community in New York, Eastman died in obscurity in a Buffalo, NY hospital. His death went unreported for eight months until an obituary by Kyle Gann appeared in the Village Voice. Eastman left behind few scores and recordings, and his music lay dormant for decades until a three-CD set of his compositions titled Unjust Malaise was issued in 2005 by New World Records. In the years since, there has been a steady increase in attention paid to his music and life, punctuated by newly found recordings and manuscripts, worldwide performances and new arrangements of his surviving works, and newfound interest from choreographers, scholars, educators, and journalists. “The brazen and brilliant music of Julius Eastman […] commands attention: wild, grand, delirious, demonic, an uncontainable personality surging into sound,” writes Alex Ross for The New Yorker.

About Harlem Chamber Players

The Harlem Chamber Players is an ethnically diverse collective of professional musicians dedicated to bringing high-caliber, affordable, and accessible live music to people in the Harlem community and beyond. Founded in 2008, The Harlem Chamber Players annually presents a rich season of formal live concerts indoors, outdoors, and online. They promote arts inclusion and equal access to the arts, bringing live music to underserved communities and promoting shared community arts and cultural engagement. The group was first inspired by the late Janet Wolfe, a longtime patron of minority musicians and the founder of the NYC Housing Authority Symphony Orchestra. The Harlem Chamber Players has presented culturally relevant programs at numerous venues throughout the city and collaborated with many other arts organizations; they serve as artists-in-residence at the Harlem School of the Arts. The Harlem Chamber Players has been featured on national radio at WQXR / WNYC at The Greene Space, and has been mentioned in articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Musical America, and on NPR, NBC, and Here and Now on ABC. The Harlem Chamber Players was awarded the 2022 Sam Miller Award for the Performing Arts.

About the Talea Ensemble

Heralded as “a crucial part of the New York cultural ecosphere” by The New York Times, the Talea Ensemble's mission is to champion musical creativity, cultivate curious listeners, and bring visionary new works to life with vibrant performances that remain in the audience's imagination long after a concert. Recipients of the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, the ensemble has brought to life over 45 commissions of major new works since it was founded in 2008, including bold and inventive productions that span multiple genres, bringing together music and other contemporary art forms such as theater and visual art. Talea has helped introduce NYC audiences to important works of seasoned composers such as Pierre Boulez, Georg Friedrich Haas, Beat Furrer, Olga Neuwirth, Unsuk Chin, and Hans Abrahamsen, and has regularly commissioned composers of the following generations. 

The Talea Ensemble's work has spanned imaginative performances, collaboration with composers, artist development projects, discussion, and reflection around music. Highlights from Talea's most recent performance seasons have included: world premieres by Wang Lu, Tyshawn Sorey, Sarah Hennies, Natacha Diels, Anthony Cheung, Agata Zubel, Mark Applebaum, and more; a production of Georg Friedrich Haas's concert-length Solstices in complete darkness; the US premiere of the immersive theater work Love & Diversity by Manos Tsangaris; and a performance of Julius Eastman's Femenine in the NY Philharmonic Artist Spotlight Series. 

Festival engagements have included performances at Lincoln Center Festival, Donaueschingen Musiktage, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, TIME:SPANS, Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, Warsaw Autumn Festival, Wien Modern, Vancouver New Music, Festival Musica, and many more. The ensemble has also partnered with institutions from across disciplines, such as the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the City of Ideas Festival in Mexico, and the Storm King Art Center. 

Talea undertakes residencies in music departments around the country to support early-career composers. Residencies in the current season include the Peabody Institute, Rice University, Hunter College, Brown University, Ithaca College, and Queens College. Since 2020, Talea has targeted support to early career composers through the Talea Access Project, which includes a commissioning program and a composer recording workshop. Talea is committed to continuing to build these artist development programs in the upcoming seasons.  

Talea Ensemble is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. Talea Ensemble's 2023-24 season projects are supported in part by the Alice M. Ditson Fund, Amphion Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, and generous donors like you. Talea Ensemble's season is also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Femenine Tracklist

JULIUS EASTMAN – Femenine (1974)
   for Chamber Ensemble
   arr. Chris McIntyre [71:59]

Total Time: 71:59

Musicians
Talea Ensemble
     Rane Moore, clarinet
     Chris McIntyre, synthesizer/music director
     Matthew Gold, percussion
     Stephen Gosling, piano
     Greg Chudzik, double bass

Harlem Chamber Players
     Brandon George, flute
     Mark Allen Jr., clarinet
     Chala Yancy, violin
     Josh Henderson, violin
     Matthew Beaugé, viola

Performance Details: 

Recording Venue: Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, New York/USA
Recording Date: 15 May 2021
Engineer: Ryan Streber
Mixing, Editing: David Adamcyk
Producer: Thomas Fichter
German Translations: Benjamin Immervoll
Publisher: G. Schirmer
Cover based on artwork by Enrique Fuentes

The recording of Julius Eastman's “Femenine” was funded by the TIME:SPANS 2020 festival and was made possible by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust.