The „Mihai Eminescu” National Theater

The Third Part of the Third Measure

The Third Part of the Third Measure is a theatrical two-channel video that creates an encounter with the militant minimalism of queer African-American avant-garde composer, pianist, vocalist, and conductor Julius Eastman. From the late 1960s until his death in 1990 at the age of forty-nine, he wrote and performed compositions whose black radical aesthetic revolutionized the new music scene on the East Coast during the 1970s and 1980s. Eastman himself once described this aesthetic as “full of honor, integrity and boundless courage.” However, no recordings of his compositions were released during his lifetime.

In January 1980, Julius Eastman was invited by the Music Department at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, to present his compositions Crazy Nigger (1978), Evil Nigger (1979), and Gay Guerrilla (1979) at the Pick-Staiger Concert Hall. A number of African-American students and one faculty member at Northwestern University objected to the titles of Eastman’s compositions which would be were redacted from the concert program printed by the Music Department. Before the concert, on 16 January 1980, Eastman delivered a public statement that responded to these objections. The speeches delivered by Dante Micheaux and Elaine Mitchener in The Third Part of the Third Measure are based on each performer’s modified transcriptions of Eastman’s Northwestern University statement. This film is focused on what The Otolith Group describe as an “experience of watching in the key of listening”, invoking the political attitudes of defiance and collective practice of movement-building present in global struggles against neoreactionary authoritarianism. ML