Song Book: The Quotient of Desire is a performance piece inspired by research on the graphic scores, personal life, and musical patterns of the late composer Julius Eastman. The title Song Book gestures toward Eastman’s infamous dispute with the minimalist composer John Cage. Eastman performed an iteration of Cage’s canonical work Song Books with the S.E.M. Ensemble at The University of Buffalo in 1975—a performance that was deemed inflammatory for its use of nudity and its emphasis on queer desire. The performance and its reception marked a pivotal turning point in the artist’s career: from then on, Eastman’s identity as both Black and queer became a critical focus in his work, expressed in forthcoming compositions like Evil N, Crazy N, and Gay Guerrilla (all 1979).
Ultimately, the dispute and Eastman’s unapologetic assertion of his identity contributed to his ostracization from much of the white experimental music world. This piece reckons with Eastman’s displacement and sets out to map the social landscapes and physical geographies that the late artist frequented in New York. This mapping holds Eastman's patterns of desire in tension with disposessive computational models deployed by New York City’s Urban Planning Department. This work asks, “How might Eastman’s errant patterns modulate computing in excess of enumeration?"
This project was part of The Kitchen L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation x School for Poetic Computation.
-KJ
