Earlier this week, I sent out a gift to my subscribers: mini audio tarot readings based on your chosen art piece. If you haven’t yet, be sure to check them out here.

Onto this week’s dispatch.

When you think of a cello, you perhaps think of an orchestra. Or you think of its place in a string quartet. But did you know that there are ensembles out there with two, three, four, even twelve cellos and no other instrument?¹

I sat in New York City before such a legion of sonic force. As 10 cellists raised their bow, about to begin, I felt the room inhale. And then, a cavalry of burnished sound galloped forward with percussive ferocity. Imagine ten cellos, all resounding at full volume. As the piece charged ahead, some cellos escaping the group to unwind their own enigmatic melodies, I felt wonderfully, cozily small within their resonance.

For context: Even being close to one cello bowed at full volume usually makes my ribcage bubble up with warmth. Ten almost turned me into a vat of chili.

They were playing The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc by American composer Julius Eastman. Eastman composed the work in 1981. What I listened to, around 2017, was a new arrangement, wherein cellist and composer Clarice Jensen transcribed the work for 10 cellos. Hear it below.

Eastman was a composer working across classical, jazz, and crossover in the 1970s and 1980s, using other methods that deemed him “experimental.” He was Black and gay, which he often folded into his work, including his composition Gay Guerilla. In other works he put slurs deliberately in the title to reclaim painful language and declare his identities in a then-radical, empowered way.

In an article originally published in New Music Box, composer Mary Jane Leach wrote about working with him in 1981: “Julius showed up in black leather and chains, drinking scotch! Julius, while externally outrageous and almost forbidding, was genuinely generous and warm, and not unkind. He was brutally honest, which doomed him (as well as many others) in a field which, if not dishonest, certainly is not forthcoming and can be surprisingly timid and conformist…” 

Despite prestigious conservatory training, teaching positions, and collaborations, he evidently lived in Tompkins Square Park for a time, where he developed a cocaine addiction and contracted HIV. He died alone in Buffalo, NY, at 49, and it took months for colleagues to know.

I deeply want to care for this queer elder of mine. I’m not alone.

As NPR explains in a 2021 post about Eastman, there’s been a resurgence in public interest around his work, particularly amid Black Lives Matter and other important movements: “To be proudly gay as a composer in the 1970s was brave enough; to be Black and gay in that world, even more so. But that confident self-awareness enabled Eastman to write music that was challenging, mischievously irreverent and sometimes ecstatic.”

His compositions were lost for years. But more are finding, transcribing, adapting, and recording them. (Here’s more about this.) I’ve found Eastman’s works to be melodic and mesmerizing. Creative and haunting, like a storm that rearranges.

The ten cellos — a powerful collective all honoring Eastman’s visionary work — were an apt vehicle for the reinvigoration of his voice.

A figure crouches at the edges of a small body of water, while holding containers of water herself. One foot is on the ground; the other atop the pond. The subconscious is just about to be fully penetrated. She pours water onto dry earth. There is an exchange of nourishment and grounding. In the nightscape above is a shower of stars, as if the invitation is to bathe in the Milky Way itself. 

Keywords for this card are hope, renewal, tranquility, restoration, awe, and the belief that we are worthy of rest. Nice things. When I get this card, my jaw unclenches. I hear Enya.

This means that one thing about The Star initially upset me.

There’s The Star — but then there’s also a card called The Sun.

Babe, these are the same!!!, I’d roar, shaking my dictionary. A sun is a star. Why!? It’s like calling one card The Leafy Green and another The Kale. 

An excellent podcast episode reframed it. In episode 7 of Strange Magic (discoverable as “Between the Worlds”), Amanda Yates Garcia and Sarah Faith Gottesdiner explain that, yes, these celestial bodies are pretty much the same. But the difference is in how we frame them with language. This matters.

The Sun is our personal star: our main girl. The diva. By calling a star a “sun,” you’re defining it by the perspective of those closest to it. You’re emphasizing its singularity. But by calling a sun a “star,” you’re zooming out, defining it by its relationship to the collective other stars in the universe.

It moves from a “me” to a “we.”

The Star suggests that to broaden your perspective, to commune with the collective and explore your place in it, is actually what inspires tranquility and awe. The beauty is not without feeling small — central to that beauty is the calming blessing of your smallness.

Back in New York, listening to the army of cellos, I thought of The Star.

Yes, a cello soloist — a single sun around which the accompanying orchestra musically revolves — is beautiful. But something about a whole collective, all dissolving into one voice in order to uplift and bring a moment of justice to Eastman’s legacy, was what actually grounded me in that beauty.

Respond and tell me a moment that made you feel wonderfully small against the grand scale of the universe.

Learn more about Julius Eastman in articles by Stanford, SF Classical Voice, and WNYC.

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