The Openly Gay Black Avant-Garde Composer Who Taught With Morton Feldman And Enraged John Cage

Julius Eastman studied piano with the great Mieczyslaw Horszowski at Curtis, got denied tenure at Buffalo, improvised an aria during Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, frequented S&M clubs, drove away his friends – and wrote extraordinary music with unorthodox notation and titles so provocative that they couldn’t be printed in programs.