Wild Up Launches New Partnership With Sierra Madre Playhouse

Contemporary music ensemble Wild Up, which has premiered hundreds of new works since its inception and engaged audiences across the country with its fresh take on classical music, will present the first of two programs in its L.A. Composer series at Sierra Madre Playhouse, its new long-term East Los Angeles-based home, on Monday, September 9, 2024, 7:30 pm.

The program, curated by and featuring Mattie Barbier on trombone and bass trumpet, Jonah Levy and Nev Wendell on trumpet, and Mason Moy on tuba, includes works by Barbier, James Tenney, and Catherine Lamb.

Barbier, an LA-based musician and sonic researcher renowned for an experimental approach to intonation, noise, and the physical processes of instruments, says the music on the program includes “long/slow form sounds that explore just-intonation (pure) tuning, in a way that's reflective of the Southern California landscape and open space.”

The program is bookended by two works written in the 1970s by the late composer James Tenney, an influential pioneer in the field of electronic and computer music and faculty member at the newly opened CalArts. For Percussion Perhaps, or ...(Night) (1971) from the Postal Pieces, opens the concert, and Saxony (1978) for brass quartet and tape delay, caps the program. The brass version of Saxony that is being featured was found unpublished in Tenney's archive by his wife, Lauren Pratt, after his death and was premiered by Wild Up in 2015. Both works were composed for several of CalArts' early faculty members.

Wild Up also premieres a new version of Catherine Lamb's Pulse/Shade (2014) for trumpets and bass trumpet that includes several pre-recorded parts. It was originally composed for four voices. Barbier notes that Lamb, currently based in Berlin, “was a critical member of the LA scene for a very long time and was also one of Tenney's last students.”

Additionally, the program includes Barbier's own paper blown between the spaces in my ribs, a 30-minute work made with field and geophone recordings from the shoreline of Lake Erie in Cleveland, Ohio, as well as from Tree People in Los Angeles, a non-profit organization that inspires, engages and supports people to take personal responsibility for the urban environment. The geophone is a type of microphone modified from seismic equipment that records surface vibrations. The work was commissioned by Chicago's Lampo, an organization that supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. 

Wild Up is a Grammy-nominated performance group noted for its unique approach to live music, fusing theater, pop music, and performance art.

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