- Julius Eastman
Crazy Nigger
- Music Sales Corporation (World)
Performance material is unavailable for this work. Apply for a license to prepare a transcription or arrangement.
- suggested: for any number of similar instruments
- 55 min
- 15th February 2025, DANCECleveland, Cleveland Heights, OH, United States of America
- 16th February 2025, DANCECleveland, Cleveland Heights, OH, United States of America
Programme Note
Composer Note
From Julius Eastman’s remarks to the audience before the premieres of Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla in January 1980 during his composer-residency at Northwestern University:
“Now, there was, there was a little problem with the titles of the piece. There were some students — and one faculty member — who felt that the titles were somehow derogatory in some manner, being that the word ‘nigger’ is in it. These particular titles: the reason I use them is because — in fact, I use — there is a whole series of these pieces, and they’re called the Nigger Series. Now, the reason I use that particular word is because, for me, it has a — what is, what I call — a basic-ness about it. That is to say, I feel that — and in any case, the first niggers were, of course, field niggers, and upon that is really the basis of what I call the American economic system: without field niggers you wouldn’t really have such a great and grand economy that we have. So, that is what I call the First and Great Nigger: field niggers. And what I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that obtains to a basic-ness, a fundamental-ness, and eschews that thing which is superficial, or — what can we say — elegant. So that a nigger, for me, is that kind of thing which is: attains himself or herself to the ground of anything, you see. And that’s what I mean by nigger — so, there are many niggers, there are many kinds of niggers. There might be — there are, of course, ninety-nine names of Allah but then there are fifty-two niggers. And so, therefore, we are playing two of these niggers.“