Del Sol is bringing a live version of Gay Guerrilla to Roarshack - the new Living Earth Show venue in SoMa - along with Derek David’s Kaddish and an encore performance of Josiah Tayag Catalan’s Foreigners to the Familiar with live poetry by Irene Faye Duller and Mei Chung.
About the pieces:
From Julius Eastman’s remarks to the audience before the premiere of Gay Guerrilla in January 1980 during his composer-residency at Northwestern University:
“Now the reason I use Gay Guerrilla — G U E R R I L L A, that one — is because these names — let me put a little subsystem here — these names: either I glorify them or they glorify me. And in the case of guerrilla: that glorifies gay — that is to say, there aren’t many gay guerrillas. I don’t feel that ‘gaydom’ has — does have — that strength, so therefore, I use that word in the hopes that they will. You see, I feel that — at this point, I don’t feel that gay guerrillas can really match with ‘Afghani’ guerrillas or ‘PLO’ guerrillas, but let us hope in the future that they might, you see. That’s why I use that word guerrilla: it means a guerrilla is someone who is, in any case, sacrificing his life for a point of view. And, you know, if there is a cause — and if it is a great cause — those who belong to that cause will sacrifice their blood, because, without blood, there is no cause. So, therefore, that is the reason that I use gay guerrilla, in hopes that I might be one, if called upon to be one.”
Derek David’s notes on String Quartet No. 4 “Kaddish”
The fourth string quartet is my first foray into bringing Yiddish music into my compositional practice, the single-movement work explores loss and mourning through two Jewish folk melodies sourced from the Ruth Rubin Legacy archives through the medium of a large. expansive Passacaglia. Writing this work was, for me, an act of Kaddish, and the act of saying Kaddish musically was through these folk songs. And as the Kaddish is a prayer of mourning and death without referencing these themes directly; both folk songs indirectly reflect on death, dying, romance or loss.
Josiah Catalan’s “Foreigners to the Familiar” interweaves live slam poetry by Irene Faye Duller, Brandon Gagante and Mei Chung. As Catalan explains:
Growing up as a Filipino-American in the Bay Area was a beautiful experience where I had friends from a number of different backgrounds and cultures. It was the type of place where we willingly took each other in and adopted each other as part of our broader communities. Some of this is reflected in the music I wrote, where there is music that alludes to the Bay Area Hyphy movement in hip-hop, the San Jose hardcore punk scene, and even the Bay Area Jazz scene – places that Filipinos have found community in as participants, artists, and leaders of their respective movements.