Two Ways to Be In a Room
Julius Eastman’s “Gay Guerrilla” exists in at least two complete recordings, and they disagree about what the piece does. The Sō Percussion recording (2015): 97.2% harmonic coherence, essentially flat across 29 minutes. The centroid barely moves for the first two-thirds — 923 Hz, 951 Hz — then surfaces into 1178 Hz at the end. The piece is a fortress. The Ein Feste Burg chorale is present from the first note; the final third makes it audible. But the harmonic structure that will become explicit was always harmonically present. You didn’t enter a fortress. You recognized you’d always been inside one. ...