Wild Up - Julius Eastman, Vol. 5: Gay Guerrilla Wild Up

Wild Up has been lauded as one of classical music’s most exciting groups by virtually every significant institution and critic within earshot. In 2010, Artistic Director Christopher Rountree founded Wild Up with 15 musicians. Today, this GRAMMY®-nominated ensemble comprises 32 performers, with membership ranging from award-winning composers to experts in contemporary techniques, baroque music specialists, activists, studio musicians, indie artists, and educators. Julius Eastman Vol. 5: Gay Guerilla is just the latest thrilling chapter in Wild Up's ongoing Eastman compendium, which has earned three GRAMMY nominations. 

In an oeuvre with no shortage of provocation, Gay Guerrilla stands among Eastman's most daring statements: An epochal work that sanctifies queerness and envisions a genuine revolution of gay liberation. As Eastman shared in remarks preceding Gay Guerrilla’s 1980 premiere: “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.” 

Wild Up reaffirms the point made by the musicologist and composer Luciano Chessa: “If all of Eastman’s music but this one were to disappear, Gay Guerrilla would still be enough to guarantee him a firm place in the history of twentieth-century music” throughout Vol. 5, drawing out the compositional characteristics and urgent themes that mark Eastman as a singular figure in American Experimentalism: queered allusions to Lutheran hymnals, almost unbearably tense passages of frenzied repetition, and explosions of melodic ecstasy. It’s a testament to the ensemble’s carefully-honed ability to perform Eastman’s idiosyncratic scores in a spirit befitting its creator.