GRAMMY-nominated ensemble Wild Up performs Arthur Russell's 24 to 24 Music, a boundary-pushing work that fuses downtown New York's experimental music with the ecstatic energy of disco. Premiered at The Kitchen in 1979 and then featuring Julius Eastman, the piece invites performers and audiences into an open-form, improvisatory experience. With ensemble, percussion, keyboards, and voices, the music builds in layers, blurring the line between concert and dance party. For this performance, Studio Theatre is transformed into a space reminiscent of the legendary Loft, encouraging audiences to move, dance, and engage fully with the sound. Russell's vision of connection through rhythm and repetition remains as vital now as it was then. Wild Up's interpretation is deeply informed by the research of writer and historian John Brackett, whose work provides crucial context for understanding the artistic and cultural legacy of 24 to 24 Music.

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WILD UP: Arthur Russell's 24 to 24 Music

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

GRAMMY-nominated orchestral collective Wild Up presents The Odes, an evening that traces a living lineage of experimentation—from the Baroque’s theatrical excess to modernist innovation and contemporary music’s daring invention. The program unfolds as a conversation across centuries, where the oldest music feels the most new, and the newest pieces make tradition strange again.

Wild Up The Odes

Walt Disney Concert Hall

GRAMMY-nominated orchestral collective Wild Up and GRAMMY-nominated cellist, scholar, and Wild Up member Seth Parker Woods present an evening of works by maverick composer Julius Eastman. Woods performs The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc–a live performance of one of the ten cello parts of the piece atop his recording of the other nine parts. This work is accompanied by Eastman’s seminal works Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc and is followed by a new transcription of That Boy by Seth Parker Woods, composed by Eastman in 1973, with oboe, percussion, voice, and clarinet.

Julius Eastman: The Holy Presence

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.

Somerville Theatre

GRAMMY-nominated orchestral collective Wild Up presents The Interior Castle, an evening of ecstatic and contemplative music by visionary women, most of them cloistered, who span centuries of artistic and spiritual inquiry. Structured in ritornello form, the program centers on four works by Ethiopian composer, pianist, and nun Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebrou, alongside new music by LA-based experimental vocalist and composer Eliza Bagg—including the world premiere of an original work and two reimaginings of the medieval abbess and polymath Hildegard von Bingen’s visionary chants. 

Wild Up

Jun 6, 2026

Wild Up

Mar 10, 2026

WILD UP: Arthur Russell's 24 to 24 Music

Mar 7, 2026

Wild Up The Odes

Wild Up