Wild Up: The Interior Castle

GRAMMY-nominated orchestral collective 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 Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou 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.