Julius Eastman Anthology

Julius Eastman wading in a lake next to a field

Julius Eastman Vol. 5: Gay Guerrilla

Wild Up announces Julius Eastman Vol. 5: Gay Guerrilla, the latest entry in their decade-long, multiple-time GRAMMY-nominated compendium on the late American composer and polymath. In their imposing rendition, 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.”

Julius Eastman Vol. 5: Gay Guerrilla is out June 19 on New Amsterdam Records. Stay tuned for more.

Wild Up’s Julius Eastman Anthology is a portrait and response to one of our favorite composers.  It is an ongoing GRAMMY® nominated multi-volume recording project and a series of performances, dialogues, and public programs, launched in 2021. We’re delving deep into Eastman’s oeuvre as we explore his inimitable compositions and idiosyncratic ways of communicating musical ideas. 

Something about the identity and presence of Eastman’s music engages us and makes us obsessed. It’s music that lives in the minds of audiences unlike anything else Wild Up has performed. With this Anthology, we are discovering how to carry his music and ideas forward.

Press

“Singularly jubilant... 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

“A masterpiece... There’s a uniquely complex freshness to the Wild Up recording.”

— The New York Times

“Instantly recognizable... an immersive, jazz-inflected chamber piece, which slowly builds into a textured soundscape of interwoven strings, horns, piano, and synthesizer.”

— Vogue

“Under the direction of Christopher Rountree and with the devotion of musicians who are also Eastman scholars and revere not just his music but the work he did to ensure that fetishistic engagement with his legacy would not override it, Wild Up creates a testament here to Julius Eastman's vastness.”

— NPR

“Sensational...This is not the only recording of Femenine. There are a few now, and all are bold and powerful. Wild Up, however, goes beyond all the others in capturing the sheer expansiveness of Eastman’s music. The repeated rhythmic tick that begins everything and never quite goes away is heard here as an invitation to dream. It is the sound of stepping out of yourself.”

— NPR on “Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy, 10 best records of 2022”

“If you're interested in art that prizes connection with one's "authentic self," this album is the sound of freedom.”

— NPR on “Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy, 10 best records of 2022”

More Press

Recordings

Eastman sometimes gifted copies of his musical scores. Now, over three decades since his death, his work is being regifted by those whose lives he touched. For us, to play Eastman’s music is to feel we are in, of, and visiting his world simultaneously. Though the band worked with scrupulous care to realize this project, part of the joy of performing it is accepting that Julius Eastman’s precise intentions for these elusive scores will always remain a mystery — just a little out of reach. Still, in the frenzied ecstasy of performing his work, we feel a little more alive, a little more connected, and a little more free. And by embarking on this anthology, we endeavor to carry this freedom forward.

The recorded performances reflect a blend of strict adherence to Eastman’s specific instructions with an embrace of individual and collective decision-making within the ensemble, a continuous three-way conversation between Eastman, our individual performers, and the group as a whole.

portrait of band members wearing all black holding their instruments against a brick wall
Julius Eastman Vol. 5: Gay Guerilla June 2026 Collapse

Julius Eastman Vol. 5: Gay Guerilla

Wild Up’s latest entry in their decade-long, multiple-time GRAMMY-nominated compendium on the late American composer and polymath Julius Eastman is Gay Guerrilla, a provocative and 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.”

On this release, Wild Up draws 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. 

With this imposing rendition, 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.”

Andrew Tholl, violin
Mona Tian, violin
Darian Donovan Thomas, violin
Andrew McIntosh, viola
Carson Rick, viola
Derek Stein, cello
Seth Parker Woods, cello
Marlon Martinez, bass
Brian Cannady, percussion
Jodie Landau, percussion
richard valitutto, piano
Adam Tendler, piano
Rachel Beetz, flute, alto flute
Claire Brazeau, oboe, english horn
Brian Walsh, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, bari saxophone
Shelley Washington, alto saxophone, bari saxophone
Marta Tiesenga, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone
Archie Carey, bassoon
Allen Fogle, french horn
Ryan Darke, trumpet

Christopher Rountree, conductor / artistic director

Produced, recorded and mixed by Lewis Pesacov with additional production by Christopher Rountree
Engineered by Lewis Pesacov and Clint Welander
Additional mixing on Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc by Clint Welander

Recorded at Fox Studio and Knobworld
Mixed at Ahata Sound

Mastered by Reuben Cohen at Lurssen Mastering, Los Angeles, CA

Album Designer: Andrea Hyde
Website Designer: Traci Larson
Cover Photo: Christine Rusiniak
Executive Producer: Elizabeth Cline
Production Director: Brian Sea

Julius Eastman Vol. 4: The Holy Presence June 2024
Julius Eastman Vol. 3: If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? June 2023
Julius Eastman Vol. 2: Joy Boy June 2022
Julius Eastman Vol. 1: Femenine June 2021

Resources

With this seven-volume project, Wild Up aims to be part of the ongoing social, political, and artistic dialogues and circulation of Eastman’s work. We are grateful for the deep and nuanced exploration of scholars, historians, artists, and critics internationally. While not exhaustive, this small collection of resources has been invaluable to us. Please let us know if you would like to add something to the collection that has been important to your engagement with Eastman.

Explore Resources

Performances

Upcoming


Past

Julius Eastman portrait_Chris Rusiniak

About Julius Eastman

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was a composer, conductor, singer, pianist, and choreographer. A singular figure in New York City's downtown scene of the 1970s and 80s, he also performed at Lincoln Center with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic and recorded music by Arthur Russell, Morton Feldman, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Meredith Monk. “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest," he said in 1976. "Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”

Eastman was young, gay, and Black at a time when it was even more difficult to be young, gay, and Black. He swerved through academia, discos, Europe, Carnegie Hall, and the downtown experimental music scene. And in 1990, at age 49, Eastman died in Buffalo, New York, less than a decade after the New York City Sheriff’s Department threw most of his scores, belongings, and ephemera into the East Village snow.

Eastman's music shines like a retroactive beacon to today’s musical creators. Any term used to characterize today’s musical landscape — “genre-fluid” or the like — was anticipated by Eastman decades before. Yet, he was punished for being ahead of his time, both in the treatment of his music and, tragically, his person. Eastman’s music flowed freely from — and through — his myriad influences and was terribly served by the musical infrastructure of his day. In our unique approaches to Eastman’s work, we’re pushing ourselves to work in dialogue with the composer’s creative impulses, channeling his individualistic spirit, augmenting the pieces with our ideas and concepts, and trying to stay true.

About Wild Up

Called “a raucous, grungy, irresistibly exuberant … fun-loving, exceptionally virtuosic family” by Zachary Woolfe of the New York Times, Wild Up has been lauded as one of classical music’s most exciting groups by virtually every significant institution and critic within earshot.

The GRAMMY® nominated ensemble was started by Artistic Director Christopher Rountree, his vision of a group of young musicians that rejected outdated traditions and threw classical repertoire into the context of pop culture, new music, and performance art. In 2020, the group celebrated 10 years of bringing people together around the belief that no music is off limits, that classical music concerts can defy convention and address the need for heart-wrenching, mind-bending experiences.

Over the past decade the group: accompanied Björk at Goldenvoice’s FYF Fest; premiered David Lang and Mark Dion’s “anatomy theater” at LA Opera; played the scores to “Under the Skin” by Mica Levi and “Punch Drunk Love” by Jon Brion live with the films at L.A.’s Regent Theater and Ace Hotel; premiered hundreds of new works including: a new opera by Julia Holter at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, new pieces from avant-pop icon Scott Walker and celestial loop-maker Juliana Barwick at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the West Coast premiere of Ragnar Kjartansson’s “Bliss” a 12-hour epic at REDCAT during the LA Phil Fluxus festival. They played a noise concert as fanfare for the groundbreaking of Frank Gehry’s new building on Grand Avenue and First Street in downtown L.A.; toured the country with their original projects “Future Folk,” and ”We the People;” championed the music of Julius Eastman; and founded the solstice series “darkness sounding.” They held residencies at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Colburn School, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, National Sawdust, and the Hammer Museum, and taught at dozens of educational institutions across the U.S.