Wild Up make music; some is new and some is old. They bend the rules a bit and are a testament to the enduring power of classical ensembles in the 21st century.
According to their website, "wild Up is an experimental classical ensemble. A flexible band of Los Angeles musicians committed to creating visceral, thought-provoking happenings."
Here are ten things to know about this up-and-coming ensemble.
1. The ensemble was founded in 2010 by Christopher Rountree, who "first fell in love with music playing bass in a garage band, trombone in a brass band, and watching the Berlin Philharmonic play Brahms and Bartok."
2. Wild Up currently comprises 24 members.
3. They were named among the best classical music of 2012 by Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed, who wrote that wild Up "exemplify the irrepressible urge to make music that matters and to find ways of doing it that radically upend old institutional models."
4. Next summer, they'll perform the winner of the 2015 American Composers Forum Composition Contest.
5. You can listen to their albums on their website or on iTunes.
6. They recently began a three-year tenure as Education Ensemble in Residence for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
7. They're social-media-savvy via Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube — where you can see things like this.
8. Rountree told the Santa Barbara Independent that "we founded wild Up with an awareness of a system that is not working. And that's not so negative; what we did was affirm something positive. It was more like, 'How can we make orchestra more fun?' I think there is this huge groundswell of energy that's happening in new classical music and even more in new chamber music. In wild Up, we have this strange overlap: part chamber ensemble, part chamber orchestra, part incredible avant-garde — we love noise music — part performance-art organization, and part theater troupe. So we do all these different functions. It feels like a really fruitful moment to be making the work we're making."
9. Wild Up's recent production Pulp combined Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, John Zorn, Julia Holter, Sun Ra, and Juan Garcia Esquivel.
10. They have also performed such recent music as Andrew Bird's "A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left."
Garrett Tiedemann is a writer, filmmaker and composer who owns the multimedia lab CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records.
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