CONCERTS

78TH SEASON OF

national gallery of art | september 22, 2019
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PROGRAM

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Wild Up

Christopher Rountree, Music Director

September 22, 2019 / 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

A Portrait: Julius Eastman

Julius Eastman (1940 – 1990)

Joy Boy (1974)

Femenine (1974)

Wild Up, photo ©Stephanie Berger
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THE ENSEMBLE

We make music.

New music. Old music.

We’ll play it, as long as we love it.

Wild Up

Wild Up is a modern music collective, an adventurous chamber orchestra, and a Los 

Angeles–based group of musicians committed to creating visceral, thought-provoking 

happenings. Wild Up believes that music is a catalyst for shared experiences, and that 

a concert venue is a place to challenge, excite, and ignite a community of listeners.

Wild Up has been called “Best in Classical Music 2015” and “a raucous, grungy, 

irresistibly exuberant . . . fun-loving, exceptionally virtuosic family” by Zachary Woolfe of 

the New York Times, “Searing. Penetrating. And thrilling,” by Fred Child of Performance 

Today, and “magnificent,” by Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times. Over the past five 

years, Wild Up has collaborated with orchestras, rock bands, and cultural institutions 

around the world.

The group began in 2010 as a self-funded, completely bootstrapped project of 

Wild Up’s artistic director and conductor, Christopher Rountree. After graduate school, 

Rountree returned to Los Angeles wanting to create an ensemble made up of young 

musicians, a group that would reject classical music’s most outdated traditions 

and embrace unusual venues and programs that throw the classical repertoire into 

the context of pop culture, new music, and performance art. The group’s first few 

concerts at art studios and rock clubs around Los Angles created a fervent fan base 

of true believers. Then UCLA’s Hammer Museum tapped Wild Up as the museum’s 

first-ever orchestra-in-residence. After dozens of concerts in the Hammer’s halls, 

courtyards, and galleries, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed the group “Best Classical 

Music of 2012.” It was off to the races, as Wild Up began working with musical and 

cultural institutions around the world.

The group has been ensemble-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber 

Orchestra and played numerous programs with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, 

including the Phil’s Brooklyn, Minimalist Jukebox, and Next on Grand Festivals. The 

group started an ongoing education partnership with the Colburn School, taught 

Creativity and Consciousness at Bard’s Longy School, led composition classes with 

the American Composers Forum and American Composers Orchestra, and founded 

an intensive educational program with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in which ten 

young composers and a faculty of eight legendary composers meet to collaborate 

on new work.

Most recently, Wild Up was ensemble-in-residence with Jennifer Koh and Shai 

Wosner at the Laguna Beach Music Festival and will premiere a few dozen new works, 

such as David Lang’s Anatomy Theater at the Los Angeles Opera. Wild Up made its New 

York debut on the American Composers Orchestra’s SONiC Festival with a program 

called West, which was selected as the New York Times “Best Classical Music 2015.”

Erin McKibben, flute and piccolo 

Izzy Gleicher, flute and piccolo 

Allen Fogle, horn

Mona Tian, violin 

Linnea Powell, viola

Seth Parker Woods, cello

Derek Stein, cello

Shelley Washington, saxophone 

Erin Rogers, saxophone 

Jodie Landau, percussion and voice

Sidney Hopson, percussion

Jiji, guitar and bass guitar

Richard Valitutto, piano

Christopher Rountree

Christopher Rountree has distinguished himself as one of classical music’s most 

forward-thinking innovators in programming, conducting, and community building. 

Whether presenting his beloved chamber group Wild Up in a museum bathroom, or 

leading renowned ensembles through new music’s most exciting works at the world’s 

greatest concert halls, Rountree is the linchpin between orchestral music and the 

future of performance.

He is known for creating the renegade twenty-four-piece ensemble Wild Up in 

2010. Now an institution in its own right, the success of Wild Up has led Rountree to 

collaborations with Björk, John Adams, David Lang, Scott Walker, La Monte Young, 

Mica Levi, Alison Knowles, Yuval Sharon, Sigourney Weaver, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ashley 

Fure, Missy Mazzoli, Ryoji Ikeda, Ted Hearne, and many of the planet’s greatest orchestras and ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, 

the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Opera national de Paris, the Los Angeles Opera, 

the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and 

the Washington National Opera.

Rountree is a seventh-generation, California native descended from Santa Cruz 

County sheriffs. He lives in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.
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If you already knew of Eastman before today, it was likely the direct or indirect 

result of hearing, or at least hearing about, that Northwestern University performance, 

via the live concert archival recordings from 1981, which was released in 2005 on New 

World Records as Unjust Malaise, a three-CD set alongside other landmark Eastman 

chamber works. The titles of these pieces and the inclusion of Eastman’s recorded 

prefatory remarks, where he patiently and sagely explains the language therein, have 

been oft-discussed, a sort of makeshift manifesto for a composer for whom the written 

and recorded record provides none. And while the arresting, polemical nature of these 

works’ titles is notable, the musical inventiveness and sheer audacity of the pieces’ 

creative power is equally compelling. Both from the audience’s perspective of sheer 

visceral experience (have you heard four pianists pound away for an hour straight?) 

and the analytical assessment of their carefully designed formal structures, Eastman’s 

signature style is on full display at the seeming height of his powers, deftly weaving 

improvisational, aleatoric, and minimalist / pop techniques into one monolithic arc.

The works on today’s program, Joy Boy and Femenine, were composed in 1974, 

a transitional year for Eastman in many respects, and they offer first glimpses into his 

creative approach arrived at by those piano pieces from 1981. He began incorporating 

large-scale, slowly shifting musical textures into what were once spare, enigmatic, 

and mercurial scores, sometimes employing pop-music idiomatic references (such as 

the disco-inflected exuberant riffs in Stay On It) and greater amounts of performer 

improvisation within controlled harmonic structures. Also, his titles grew increasingly 

uncompromising and provocative, centered on asserting his queer black identity, 

literally forcing the issue into the spotlight and, moreover, onto the printed program, 

poster, and marquee.

In the early ’70s, Eastman’s diverse compositional experiments could be summed 

up as pluralistic and avant-garde, churning out a wide variety of works that all fell 

under the umbrella of Euro-American experimentalism, in the vein of John Cage, 

Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown. This was during his few years of residency with the 

Creative Associates at SUNY-Buffalo (directed by Lukas Foss), as a performer and 

composer, which eventually ended abruptly in 1975 when Eastman moved to New York 

City. The decision to move could have been Eastman’s desire to seek divergent creative 

paths that spoke more to his interests in jazz improvisation, multidisciplinary theatricality, and a political activism sparked by the national news and uproar over the Attica 

prison riots. Or more salaciously, it could have been the result of a falling out with 

John Cage, after the venerable experimentalist publicly scolded Eastman for “misinterpreting” one of Cage’s more open-ended pieces from Song Books. Cage’s uncharacteristically angry act and the words he used (which were recorded at the time) are hard 

to read with our contemporary minds as anything other than thinly veiled racism and 

homonormative privilege, a rejection of Eastman’s blackness, queerness, and sheer 

PROGRAM NOTES

What is happening this afternoon would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. Even 

more remarkable is that events such as this one — a portrait concert celebrating and 

reveling in the obvious power of Julius Eastman’s singular music, which went virtually 

unperformed in the 1990s and 2000s — have been occurring more often in the past 

decade, all over the world. After Eastman died a quietly tragic death at the age of 

forty-nine in 1990, nearly twenty-five years went by where it seemed he was on his 

way to vanishing completely from the collective creative consciousness. Kyle Gann’s 

obituary in The Village Voice, contrite and elegiac in its belatedness, was published 

nine months later. But Eastman’s many idiosyncrasies as a creative person (not to 

mention his undeniably proud identity as an African-American effeminate gay in a 

world dominated by straight white male privilege) made his easy transition into the 

contemporary classical music record of posterity problematic. Thankfully the vitality 

and fecundity of Eastman — concert pianist of all repertoires, virtuoso opera singer, 

composer, actor, dancer, painter, and all-around creative polymath — is now being 

acknowledged for his crucial contributions to American art. His scores and related 

documentation are being recovered and preserved with increasing momentum and 

urgency. Most important, his work is being rediscovered, performed, and experienced 

by musicians and audiences all over the world. Because one doesn’t really listen to 

an Eastman work as much as one experiences it. The seismic shift Eastman caused in 

the canon of American experimentalism is finally being fully felt, an aftershock even 

greater than the initial quake of his already uncontainable musical persona.

Call it what you will: archival fate, luck, or the too-late come-uppance of a stifled 

creative genius ahead of his time. Thanks to the exhaustive efforts initially spearheaded 

by Mary Jane Leach — composer, “accidental musicologist” (her term), and Eastman’s 

longtime friend and colleague — the works and legacy of Eastman are being gradually 

salvaged. The celebration of discoveries and recoveries is equaled only by the sobering 

reality that a good deal of the work is most likely irretrievably gone. There’s a score 

manuscript here, a concert recording there, but the majority of his sizeable oeuvre 

was literally scattered to the wind by the New York City police when they evicted him 

from his East Village apartment in early 1982, leading to years of homelessness and 

professional floundering. Ironically, Eastman’s personal-life rupture occurred amidst his 

most promising years: between the release of prominent recording projects featuring 

his abilities as keyboardist and singer with Meredith Monk (Dolmen Music) and Arthur 

Russell (Dinosaur L’s 2424 Music), and one year after his notable composer-performer 

residency at Northwestern University, where three large-scale, proto-minimalist works 

for four grand pianos were composed and premiered: Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and 

Gay Guerrilla.
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the music seems too self-same, almost monotonous, but the meditative profundity of 

Femenine is balanced and decorated by a constantly and freely improvising piano-part, 

and eventually the sum-total reveals lush, ecstatic textures where single tones seem 

to disappear into a rapturous harmonic ocean, wave after wave. This confident, tidal 

inexorability is later varied and anchored by calls-to-action from the piano and bass 

instruments, followed by blasted, dissonant, insistent responses from the full band. In 

contrast with the naive, youthful “masculine” of Joy Boy, the “feminine” now occupies 

its place as an eternal, grounded, creative force.

In 1979, Eastman published a pithy op-ed in EAR Magazine, “The Composer as 

Weakling.” In this exhortation to modern-day performers and composers alike, 

Eastman urges musicians to transcend the received hierarchy and narratives of 

Western art music and scolds them for their collective lapse into specialization and 

creative quarantining, with the brunt of his invective focused on the composer 

“birthing music in his lonely room.” While the male pronoun seemed to be used 

throughout for convention’s sake, in the final paragraphs, Eastman’s sexual politics 

and aesthetic ideals coalesce in a poetic conflation and alternation of gendered 

pronouns: “The composer is therefore enjoined to accomplish the following: she 

must establish himself as a major instrumentalist, he must not wait upon a descending 

being, and she must become an interpreter. . . and give a fresh new view of the known 

and unknown classics.” While the specialist composer “he” is regarded as antiquated 

and weak, Eastman freely switches to “she” pronouns with the pronouncement of 

renewed vitality and relevance to the musical culture. Before it became a hashtag or 

a meme, it would seem that Eastman was already asserting: “The Future is Female.”

As an ensemble, Wild Up revels in opportunities to collaborate in multidisciplinary 

ways. Albeit posthumously, our collaboration with Eastman in this regard includes 

everything we love about contemporary classical musical practice. We are encouraged 

to bring to bear an exuberant abandon in unbridled spontaneous creativity. We grapple 

with a constantly evolving performance practice that includes styles and interpretive 

modes from the vast spectrum of modern day genres. And we are required to deeply 

consider the crucial intersectionality of Eastman’s musical legacy and the immediacy 

it carries with it, necessitating awareness and compassion concerning issues that have 

become even more increasingly relevant as we approach the third decade of our 

twenty-first-century world.

Program notes by Richard Valitutto, pianist

audacity in the mind of an “establishment experimentalist.” In American classical 

culture, even with its fair share of white gay men, Eastman’s ever-present bawdy 

queerness and eventually his overt political agenda were certainly not commonplace, 

especially when viewed against the quietly homosexual “mindfulness” persona of John 

Cage. From both on and off the stage, anecdotes from Eastman’s friends and collaborators consistently reveal a person who reveled in his queer identity, so comfortably 

that he often employed it as an awkward weapon of social subterfuge. By 1974, these 

politics of homoeroticism and gender-fluidity — formerly limited to and hidden within 

the abstract musical material itself via suggestive vocalizations, nontraditional playing 

techniques, and campy presentational aesthetic — had moved decidedly to the forefront of his compositions; personality metamorphosed to aesthetic.

Thanks to the Norwegian record label Frozen Reeds, we have live recordings of 

Joy Boy and Femenine with Eastman himself performing as singer and pianist, respectively. Evidence exists that the two pieces were often performed at the same concert, 

and that on more than one occasion Eastman performed in surreal drag attire (an act 

not limited to the performances of his own music!). The pieces collectively contribute 

to a re-mythologizing of gender beyond the contemporary heteronormative binary, 

where Eastman’s conflation of gender identities seems to be an intentional upending 

of traditional assumptions, in personal identity and cultural awareness. Both pieces 

have a fair amount of open-endedness, but their most tightly controlled element is 

pitch: performers are constrained to prescribed melodic or harmonic content at any 

given moment, but they are essentially improvising freely in terms of rhythm and note 

selection within that parameter (as well as simply whether to play at all). Beyond this 

compositional similarity, the overall scope and emotional affect of the works could 

not be more different: Joy Boy is brief, frenetic, mercurial, and borders on hilarity. 

The masculine has thus been recast as flighty, campy, unpredictable, and ephemeral. 

Instruments and duration for Joy Boy are not specified, with chord and small sectional 

changes cued by the performers ad lib, but the recording of Eastman’s performance 

with three other members of the SEM Ensemble has them singing in falsetto and 

playing woodwinds for about nine minutes. In contrast, the numerous expansive 

sections of Femenine are controlled by stopwatch timings, and the score takes at 

least sixty-three minutes to perform, depending on how long the final, open-ended 

section lasts. The persistent vibraphone motive — a thirteen-beat syncopated fanfare 

using only two pitches — is unchanging throughout. With a few exceptional dramatic 

moments, the piece exists entirely in E-flat major, mostly pentatonic, eschewing the 

leading tones which would make the music feel like it’s “going somewhere.” The 

melodic material changes very gradually: Eastman adds or subtracts a note or two, 

or changes / adds octaves every few minutes, and the rhythmic density increases or 

decreases often on the scale of tens of minutes at a time. In its first several minutes, 
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Upcoming Events of the SeventyEighth Season of The William Nelson 

Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin Concerts

Unless otherwise noted, concerts 

are held in the West Building, West 

Garden Court.

Sound Sketch

New York Opera Society

Challenging Convention: Spanish 

Modernism in Art and Music in the 1930s 

Music by Rodrigo, Llorca, and others 

whose music intertwines with Spanish 

art from the Gallery’s collection.

September 27, 12:10

Victory Hall Opera

Heartstrings: Music of the Victorian Parlor

Celebrating Eye of the Sun: NineteenthCentury Photographs from the National 

Gallery of Art

Music by Amy Beach, Brahms, Chopin, 

Stephen Foster, Carrie Jacobs-Bond, 

George F. Root, and Schumann. 

September 29, 3:30

Rachel Barton Pine, violin

Jory Vinikour, harpsichord

J. S. Bach Masterpieces for Violin 

and Harpsichord

This concert is first in a series of 

performances by female violinists, 

showcasing the brilliance and stylistic 

versatility of the instrument from 

jazz, bluegrass, and baroque to 

contemporary classical programs.

October 6, 3:30

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art 

and all of its programs is free of charge, 

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording 

equipment during the performance 

is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic 

devices are turned off.

—

Concerts are made possible in part 

through the generosity of donors to the 

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition 

of their support. Please contact the 

development office at (202) 842-6450 or 

circle@nga.gov for more information.

—

The department of music produced 

these program notes. Copyright © 2019 

Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, 

Washington

Edmond Lebel, Still Life of Musical Instruments, c. 1863, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Robert B. Menschel Fund
NGA.GOV/MUSIC