New York, NY — March 4, 2025 — The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents the Wild Up: Darkness Sounding on Friday and Saturday, March 21 & 22, 2025 at 7:30pm ET on the David Geffen Stage at Kaufmann Concert Hall and Sunday, March 23, 2025 at 2pm ET at Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnold Center. Tickets start at $40.
Los Angeles-based music collective Wild Up breaks their acclaimed Darkness Sounding festival out of LA for the first time, premiering it in New York City on 92NY’s stages. The trio of concerts follows the enormous success of Wild Up’s Radical Adornment: The Music of Julius Eastman at 92NY in 2023. The festival of concerts, conversations and workshops exploring how sound and music shape our understanding of the world has been called “sincere, outdoorsy, a little trippy” by The New York Times. Convening around themes of mindfulness and nature, Darkness Sounding centers on deep listening, intentional gathering, and thoughtful questioning to foster awareness and expand connections to ourselves, each other, and the natural world. Join us for this boundary-pushing weekend of concert experiences merging listening, ritual, and community.
About Darkness Sounding:
In music, tuning sets the stakes and the boundaries of our world. It is the carbon we build mountains with, the oxygen we breathe in; it is our environment and, within the duration of a piece, it becomes us. Tunings often resemble nature, ratios instead of generalities, cycles mirroring the cosmos, and patterns turning up anywhere and everywhere the way we see for example, Fibonacci’s fractals in nature. With that outlook then, we turn to look toward ancient music and pieces yet to be heard to find tuning, central in its crystal mathematics and ecstatic formalities, shaping a whole weekend of music making. For this special searching we call Darkness Sounding congregating and coalescing for the first time outside Los Angeles at 92NY, this year honoring tuning.
Three Nights of Performances:
Friday, March 21, 2025 at 7:30pm
Christopher Rountree, artistic director
Tony Conrad, Four Violins (East Coast premiere of new version arr. McIntosh)
Andrew McIntosh, Fixations (East Coast premiere)
Sarah Davachi, The Lower Melodies (world premiere)
The burning distortion of ring-modulated electric violins tuned to the feedback of their amps in Tony Conrad’s Four Violins, the East Coast premiere of Andrew McIntosh’s microcosmic patterning Fixations, the world premiere of Sarah Davachi’s full Lower Melodies in which timbres and tunings become overlapping, and resonances become so indescribably intertwined that instruments and even individuals seem to be destroyed within the mass.
Tickets available at https://www.92ny.org/event/wild-up-1.
Saturday, March 22, 2025 at 7:30pm
Christopher Rountree, artistic director
Scott Walker, Rubato (It: ‘Stolen Time’) (East Coast premiere)
Leilehua Lanzilotti, with eyes the color of time
Claude Vivier, Zipangu
James Tenney, Saxony
Legendary avant-pop icon Scott Walker’s final piece was a siren storm written for Wild Up, and they are honored to bring Rubato (It: ‘Stolen Time’) for trombones, strings, and electronics to NYC, performing it for the first time outside Los Angeles. Wild Up pairs the songs and lineages of Leilehua Lanzilotti’s Pulitzer finalist work with eyes the color of time and queer Canadian composer Claude Vivier’s futurist Zipangu, ending with LA composer James Tenney’s celestial improvised wall of overtones, Saxony.
Tickets available at https://www.92ny.org/event/wild-up-3.
Sunday, March 23, 2025 at 2pm
Christopher Rountree, artistic director
Andrew McIntosh plays Biber’s Rosary Sonatas
Baroque violinist and Wild Up member Andrew McIntosh will give a rare performance of Heinrich Biber’s Rosary Sonatas. Composed circa 1675, the Rosary Sonatas are a set of fifteen violin sonatas, each featuring a different re-tuning of the open strings, with radical musical depictions of earthquakes, trumpets, prayer, suffering, adoration, awe, violence, love, pain, acceptance, crowns, joy, teaching, mystery, and victory. These sonatas served as an inspiration for composer Tony Conrad in the 1950s when he was a violin student at Harvard, sending him down the path of re-tuning which would later become central to his work with the Theater of Eternal Music. Conrad’s iconic 1964 recording, Four Violins (which Wild Up is performing in McIntosh’s arrangement on Friday night), is in the same tuning as Biber’s 10th sonata , which depicts the crucifixion of Jesus. A recent performance by McIntosh of the Rosary Sonatas in Los Angeles was described by Alex Ross in The New Yorker as one of the most memorable performances of 2023.
Featuring: Ian Pritchard (harpsichord/organ), Maxine Eilander (baroque harp), Malachai Bandy (viola da gamba)
Tickets available at https://www.92ny.org/event/wild-up-2.
Called “a raucous, grungy, irresistibly exuberant…fun-loving, exceptionally virtuosic family” (New York Times), Wild Up has been lauded as one of new music’s most exciting groups by virtually every significant institution and critic within earshot. Artistic Director Christopher Rountree started the orchestral collective in 2010 to eschew outdated concert traditions by experimenting with different methodologies, approaches, and contexts.
After a decade and a half of rampant creativity and curiosity Wild Up is the ambassador of West Coast music. The group has collaborated with a wide range of composers, performers, and cultural institutions, premiering and creating hundreds of new works. They accompanied Björk at Goldenvoice’s FYF Fest, sung into a Picasso with Pamela Z at LACMA, and created Democracy Sessions—playing against growing autocracy with Raven Chacon, Ted Hearne, Chana Porter, Ursula K. LeGuin, Harmony Holiday, Saul Williams, and Karlheinz Stockhausen at MOCA. They premiered David Lang and Mark Dion’s Anatomy Theater at LA Opera, often collaborated with the Martha Graham Dance Company, and performed scores for Under the Skin by Mica Levi and Punch-Drunk Love by Jon Brion at the Regent Theater and Ace Hotel. They were booed out of Toronto for playing a piece too quietly. Wild Up premiered a new opera by Julia Holter at National Sawdust, debuted an avant-pop work by Scott Walker at Walt Disney Concert Hall, sustained 12 hours of Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss at REDCAT, and championed Julius Eastman’s music worldwide. They blared a noise concert as fanfare for the groundbreaking of Frank Gehry’s building on Grand Avenue and First Street. The group has been lavished with praise by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR, Pitchfork and many more publications and critics.
Their decade-long, critically acclaimed, multi-GRAMMY nominated Julius Eastman Anthology has been celebrated as “A masterpiece.” (New York Times) “instantly recognizable” (Vogue) and “singularly jubilant..a bit in your face, sometimes capricious, and always surprising” by NPR who named the anthology’s first installment, Julius Eastman Vol. 1: Femenine, among the top ten records of 2021 in all genres.
About The 92nd Street Y, New York: The 92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) is a world-class center for the arts and innovation, a convener of ideas, and an incubator for creativity. 92NY offers extensive classes, courses and events online including live concerts, talks and master classes; fitness classes for all ages; 250+ art classes, and parenting workshops for new moms and dads. The 92nd Street Y, New York is transforming the way people share ideas and translate them into action all over the world. All of 92NY’s programming is built on a foundation of Jewish values, including the capacity of civil dialogue to change minds; the potential of education and the arts to change lives; and a commitment to welcoming and serving people of all ages, races, religions, and ethnicities. For more information, visit www.92NY.org.