The Interior Castle
About
Wild Up presents The Interior Castle, an evening of ecstatic and contemplative music by visionary women, most of them cloistered, who span centuries of artistic and spiritual inquiry.
Structured in ritornello form, the program centers on four works by Ethiopian composer, pianist, and nun Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebrou, alongside new music by LA-based experimental vocalist and composer Eliza Bagg—including the world premiere of an original work and two reimaginings of the medieval abbess and polymath Hildegard von Bingen’s visionary chants. The program concludes with a world premiere by Wild Up member M.A. Tiesenga, inspired by St. Teresa of Ávila’s mystical treatise The Interior Castle.
The program reclaims devotional music as a site of radical interiority and resistance to external forces. Through mazes of sound and reflection, The Interior Castle honors nuns, mystics, and seekers who turned inward to challenge the norms of their time and remake the world. Their restlessness endures today, recalling that an interior life can shape a collective one when listening becomes a form of devotion and attention a means of liberation.
About Endless Season
Art in LA has long been about freedom and a rich rejection of history. With intersecting methods and intentions, it is humble yet aspirational, creating a city that appeals to the aesthete and mystic in all its citizens. Here, famous artists also double as street-side sign painters, our finest restaurants are located in strip malls, and our landmarks are more geographical than architectural or fleetingly experiential rather than permanent monuments to their lineages. Here, our religious and secular musics sound the same.
Endless Season revolves around these distinct West Coast traits. These programs mark a new chapter, focusing on sustainability and place, and investing in the artists and audiences who make our city vibrant. Together, we encourage, question, reinterpret, and challenge the past, modality, and genre. We hold a space for intersectionality and dialogue surrounding every aspect of our work.
About Wild Up at REDCAT
At REDCAT, Wild Up creates a dialogue between past and present with music that transforms tradition and makes the radical timeless. Join LA’s multi-Grammy-nominated orchestral collective for two boundary-pushing concerts that highlight the vitality of the baroque spirit alongside new ideas for the future of music.
Endless Season 2025 - 2026
This season, our programming spans centuries and scenes, bridging devotional traditions with avant-garde experimentation, ancient mysticism with radical contemporary thought. We gather music from the margins, from outsiders, visionaries, and mystics to imagine new futures. Alongside these histories, we celebrate today’s artists who are building something shared, creating music that reckons with the past and fosters new forms of presence and connection.
Our work includes a new concert series at The Nimoy exploring the textures of ecstatic freedom, from improvisation to minimalism and beyond. We return to Sierra Madre Playhouse for our LA Composer series, and REDCAT for baroque new music and a concert of spiritual activism centering the work of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou with a new commission by M.A. Tiesinga. This year, we launch a new endeavor, The Collective Orchestra, with participatory and unexpected projects that transform the concept of orchestra into a communal social space of learning. This Spring marks our first-ever appearance at the legendary Big Ears Festival.
Join us for a year of exploring music as a spiritual inquiry and a burgeoning of collective imagination, shaping new rituals and ways of gathering together.