Apartment House review – Julius Eastman's elusive music gets its due

Until about five years ago, few on this side of the Atlantic knew much about Julius Eastman’s music. He would have been remembered as a vocalist, especially for his astonishing performance as George III in the first recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, but his work as a composer, music that blurred the boundaries between early minimalism and improvisation and often carried politically provocative titles, went unperformed.

Eastman died in 1990 at the age of 49, homeless and ignored. He’d been destitute for several years, and the scores of many works had disappeared. Much of the music that survives has had to be painstakingly reconstructed or transcribed from recordings since his death, but in 2016 it finally began to appear on disc, and a number of performers began to take up its challenges. One of the British groups to have explored Eastman’s music is Apartment House, and their Wigmore concert, the first evening of contemporary music in the hall’s new socially distanced, live-streamed season, brought together two of their realisations of his ensemble pieces, Femenineand Joy Boy, both composed in 1974.

Eastman’s scores certainly leave a lot of decisions to the performers. They tend to be as minimal as the music itself: the 75-minute Femenine consists of just five pages, while Joy Boy is contained on a single page, with verbal instructions as important as musical notes, but they generate musical structures of unexpected intensity. Against a background halo of jingling sleigh bells, Femenine builds from a short, repeating vibraphone phrase, steadily adding instrumental lines (there was an ensemble of eight here) and becoming harmonically richer and more profound as it goes on. There are clear links with Terry Riley’s In C, but also moments of surging power that seem to anticipate Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which appeared two years later, though Eastman’s work seems more concerned with repetition as a starting point for the performers than as a musical process in itself.

Apartment House’s performance certainly projected the almost ecstatic intensity that Femenine generates at times, if without quite capturing the unpredictable wildness that some performers have found in Eastman’s music. Their account of the smaller-scale Joy Boy, with its tightly bundled instrumental lines, was just as impressive, for its total absorption into this very distinctive, yet elusive musical world.

•Available on demand online at Wigmore Hall or YouTube. Our critic reviewed this concert from the live stream.