EPSG:4326

Perspectives: Wild Up

Cleveland Institute of Music

Julius Eastman’s ecstatic, jubilant, hypnotic music pulses, surges, recedes, and eventually blossoms with an organic energy best expressed by only the most cohesive and committed ensembles. Wild Up, the acclaimed Los Angeles contemporary music collective performs the composer’s glittering Femenine (1974), part of a multiyear project to perform and record Eastman’s daring, original scores. In the New York contemporary music scene of the 1970s and ’80s, Eastman was both an outsider and provocateur—his motto was “to be what I am to the fullest: Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, and a homosexual to the fullest.” He died in obscurity and poverty in 1990 at age 49; decades later, Eastman’s music is enjoying a renaissance as his scores have been unearthed and enterprising performers have devoted themselves to realizing his uncompromising vision. “Wild Up’s new rendition of Femenine takes a page from Eastman’s personal playbook: It’s exuberant, a bit in your face, sometimes capricious, and always surprising” (NPR Music).

Wild Up

University of California, Berkeley

Julius Eastman was an American maverick and radical who challenged the exclusionary foundations of European classical music and organized his compositions as tools for social change. Eastman was also an activist who deployed his life experiences as a gay African American as the impetus to question what it means to be American and an artist, and the ideals of United States and western classical music. Wild Up Artistic Director Christopher Rountree launched the ensemble in 2010 with a vision that rejected outdated traditions and threw classical repertoire into the context of pop culture, new music, and performance art.

Wild Up: The Music of Julius Eastman

Stanford University

Julius Eastman was an American maverick and radical who challenged the exclusionary foundations of European classical music and organized his compositions as tools for social change. Eastman was also an activist who deployed his life experiences as a gay African American as the impetus to question what it means to be American and an artist, and the ideals of United States and western classical music.  Wild Up Artistic Director Christopher Rountree launched the ensemble in 2010 with a vision that rejected outdated traditions and threw classical repertoire into the context of pop culture, new music, and performance art.

A concert of Femenine by maverick composer Julius Eastman, co-presented with and performed by critically acclaimed classical music ensemble Wild Up.

Los Angeles-based ensemble Wild Up creates mind-bending and theatrical contemporary music experiences by playing with place, structure, the relation of artist to audience: any aspect of the concert experience is up for reinvention at any time.

Wild Up

Mar 24, 2024

Perspectives: Wild Up

Mar 9, 2024

Wild Up

Wild Up