2024 David Lieberman Artist’s Representatives. All Rights Reserved.
Wild Up is a collective of artists who work together at the vanguard of classical music. Wild Up is a laboratory for experimenting with the future of sound. It’s an ethos about what a concert should feel like, how music should function in our lives, and how music can bring us together. To us, the name Wild Up means: the thoughtful, unabashed, hearts open, eyes up feeling that connects us when we make and listen to music.
Wild Up’s festival of happenings, workshops, and concerts around mindfulness, drone music, health, and wellness that the New York Times calls “Sincere, Outdoorsy, Trippy, a Music Festival that Breaths Los Angeles.” Darkness Sounding is about surrounding a community in ideas and sound, creating rituals that uplift and bind that community together. Featuring underscored conversations by essayists and thinkers alongside world premieres by leading US composers like Sarah Davachi, inti figgis-vizueta, Sarah Hennies, claire rousay, Leilehua Lanzillotti, Andrew McIntosh, and others.
The music of legendary collaborators Julius Eastman and Arthur Russell is singular and boundless. Eastman’s post-gospel minimalism influenced and changed by playing as a member of Arthur Russell’s downtown experimental disco band — they made sounds expansive, vulnerable, activist, and quintessentially queer. Their profound and personal sounds demand that performers become unabashedly themselves, merging and getting lost in the notes and rhythms, finding themselves again and again, and emerging whole and newly committed to self. This intrapersonal endeavoring is matched externally with musical structures that create deep belonging within a group.
A new musical-theatrical-operatic adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s seminal science fiction work, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, by composer Ted Hearne and librettist Chana Porter. The creative team is Ted Hearne (composer), Chana Porter (librettist), Kaneza Schaal (director), and Christopher Rountree (conductor).
A portrait and response to one of our favorite composers. A series of performances and a multi-volume anthology, over a half decade or so. Julius Eastman was young, gay, and black, when it was even more difficult to be young, gay, and black in America. He swerved in, out, and through academia, downtown experimental music, discos, European tours, sex clubs, and Carnegie Hall. He died at 49 in Buffalo, New York, less than a decade after the New York City Sheriff’s Department threw most of his scores and belongings into the winter snow of the East Village.
Julius sometimes gave the single manuscript copies of his scores as gifts. Now, his music is being rightfully acknowledged because the people whose lives he touched are sharing his gifts in return.
There’s something about the identity and presence of Eastman’s music that engages us and makes us obsessed. It’s music that, we’ve found, lives in the minds of audiences unlike anything else Wild Up has performed. With this Anthology we endeavor to discover the way to carry his music forward.
2024 David Lieberman Artist’s Representatives. All Rights Reserved.
