by Mike Telin
On the homepage of the new music ensemble Wild Up, you’re met with this description of who they are: “We’re Wild Up. We’re a band. An experiment in its second decade. We make shows, and records. We tell stories and make projects that live somewhere between new music and theater and performance art and pop.”
On Sunday, March 24 at 7:30 pm in Mixon Hall, the CIM Perspectives series will present the new music and composer collective Wild Up. Their program includes works by Raven Cachon, inti figgis-vizueta, Jürg Frey, Felipe Lara, and Julius Eastman. The concert is free but seating passes are required.
I caught up with artistic director and conductor Christopher Roundtree (pictured) by phone and began the conversation by asking him to talk me through the group’s program.
Raven Chacon’s Whistle Quartet
We all love Raven, and Whistle Quartet is beautiful. It’s a graphic score with simple instructions. It says the first player should use a very small whistle to create a musical line of their choosing that responds to the score. And then another player comes in and tries to replicate that line as accurately as possible, followed by a third person, then a fourth person, and so on.
Raven’s scores are beautiful to look at, and his Zitkála-Šá score was in the 2022 Whitney Biennial.