Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the ASCAP Foundation’s Leonard Bernstein Award and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).
Montgomery’s growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral music. Recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019), commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta; and Banner (2014)—written to mark the 200th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—which was written for the Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation and presented in its UK premiere at the BBC Proms in August 2021.
Summer 2021 brought a varied slate of premiere performances, including Five Freedom Songs, a song cycle conceived with and written for soprano Julia Bullock, along with the Sun Valley and Grand Teton music festivals, San Francisco and Kansas City symphonies, Boston and New Haven symphony orchestras, and Virginia Arts Festival; I was waiting for the echo of a better day, a site-specific collaboration with Bard SummerScape and Pam Tanowitz Dance; and Passacaglia, a flute quartet for the National Flute Association’s 49th annual convention.
Since 1999, Montgomery has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players. She has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble.
A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a PhD candidate in music composition at Princeton University. She is professor of violin and composition at The New School. In May 2021, she began her three-year appointment as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Soul Force is a one-movement symphonic work which attempts to portray a voice that struggles to be heard beyond the shackles of oppression. The music takes on the form of a march, which begins with a single voice and gains mass as it rises to a triumphant goal.
Drawing on elements of popular African American musical styles, such as big-band jazz, funk, hip hop, and R&B, the piece pays homage to the cultural contributions—the many voices—which have risen against aggressive forces to create an indispensable cultural place.
I have drawn the work’s title from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he states, “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
—Jessie Montgomery
“Jazz,” wrote George Gershwin, “is an American folk music, a very powerful one which is probably in the blood of the American people more than any other style of folk music … I believe it can be made the basis of serious symphonic works of lasting value.” This is a much-debated assertion, not so much because of its argument about the constitution of American blood, but because of its argument about jazz. Gershwin managed to bring down the wrath of two kinds of purists—1930s disciples of “The True Jazz,” who lambasted Gershwin for trying to codify an improvisatory form, and conservative music critics who, as Edward Jablonski puts it, denounced him for introducing “all that bawdy-house music into the sacred precincts of Carnegie Hall.” Several American composers—perhaps envious of Gershwin’s enormous popular success—have echoed this criticism, chiding him for his “superficial Americana” (Virgil Thomson) and his failure to concentrate jazz elements into “a significant formal cast” (William Flanagan).
Despite these criticisms, Gershwin arguably remains one of the most popular American composers, and his stock has steadily risen with academics. To the charge that Gershwin’s source was less “pure” jazz than commercial popular music of the 1920s, the composer’s admirers reply, “So, what?” Indeed, it is precisely Gershwin’s fondness for amalgamation—with combined elements of jazz, pop, classical, blues, ragtime, and Tin Pan Alley—that are part of his peculiarly American charm. European masters and Gershwin champions like Stravinsky, Ravel, and Schoenberg recognized this charm from the beginning, often in stark contrast to their American colleagues.
The Piano Concerto in F—which the composer himself premiered in 1925 at Carnegie Hall with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony—is quintessential Gershwin. Sometimes brash and saucy and at other times swooning and sentimental, it whirls the listener along with a dizzying succession of ideas inspired by blues, ragtime, the Charleston, and dance-band waltz rhythms, encompassing enough ideas for two or three concertos.
Gershwin’s music has a distinctive, instantly recognizable voice, yet his achievements align with those of Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Bartók: He was a virtuoso pianist who premiered his own works and brought the vernacular culture of his country into the classical repertory. In the Piano Concerto in F, Gershwin deftly contains his clashing moods and themes within the structure of the classical concerto. The work includes a sonata-form first movement, a soulful slow movement, and a brilliant Allegro agitato finale. The main unifying element, however, is Gershwin’s strong musical personality, which imprints every note. Whether it’s the formal and dignified opening theme for piano, the intentionally cloying show tune for strings just before the development section, the toccata-like main theme of the finale (an outgrowth of Gershwin’s admiration of Bach), or the steamy blues riffs in the slow movement, it all sounds distinctly Gershwin.
Though The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes Gershwin’s works as too episodic and not properly developed, Gershwin invented a new sound, one that is neither popular nor classical, but rather defined precisely by its distinctive flexibility. There is a freedom in Gershwin, a willingness to take risks and swing casually from elegance to vulgarity, from earnestness to campiness—a daredevil quality that is not found in the more neoclassical jazz pastiches of Milhaud, Stravinsky, and Ravel.
Often called upon to caress the keys with silken suaveness only to suddenly begin thumping and pounding into a new dance episode, the pianist’s role in the concerto is particularly unpredictable. Yet with the possible exception of the rapid repeated notes in the finale, the soloist is not allowed to be as ostentatious and independent as in the concerto’s smash hit predecessor, Rhapsody in Blue. Throughout the concerto, the pianist is an equal partner with the orchestra: This is a “real” concerto rather than a rhapsody, with fascinating interplay between the soloist and Gershwin’s lavishly colored orchestra. The concerto offers such an abundance of big moments that the listener soon surrenders to them rather than trying to sort them out. One moment that stands out is the swaying, melancholy tune that the orchestra introduces after a piano cadenza in the middle of the second movement, which makes up the soul of the work with its bluesy trumpet solos and bittersweet mood.
The first two movements spill over into the finale, which can’t resist reintroducing several of the earlier themes. The most dramatic example of this cyclical style is a final reappearance of the concerto’s opening theme just before a series of shuddering orchestral tremolos leads to the work’s exhilarating close.
The Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff’s last completed work, inhabit the same twilight world as the Third Symphony and Fourth Piano Concerto. Like these other late pieces, the Symphonic Dances are unquestionably Romantic, but have an emotional and harmonic ambiguity not found in early Rachmaninoff; they are rich in melodic material, but deliver few of the “big tunes” (a striking exception being the second subject of the first dance) offered in warhorses such as the piano concertos.
The Symphonic Dances were written in 1940 at Rachmaninoff’s home in Huntington, Long Island, for Eugene Ormandy (a longtime Rachmaninoff champion) and The Philadelphia Orchestra. The suave string sonority favored by the Philadelphians was given ample opportunity for display in the work, but even more memorable are other orchestral touches, including a gorgeous saxophone solo over woodwind band in the first dance, a hallucinated series of woodwind chromaticisms in the second dance, and the awesome clangor of tubular bells in the finale.
Thematically, the dances offer a fascinating amalgam of elements: At various times, we hear fragments of Russian Orthodox chant; quotations from Rachmaninoff’s The Bells, and the First and Third symphonies; as well as eerie soundings of the medieval chant “Dies irae” (which, along with the tubular bells, irresistibly invokes the “Dreams of a Witches’ Sabbath” movement from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique). These references are subtle and not ostentatious, but they do give the work the feeling of a swan song.
Altogether, this is one of Rachmaninoff’s darkest, most original scores—a fittingly bittersweet finale for a man who attained considerable fame in America, but was also a lonely exile both from his own country and the dominant sensibility of his own century. Rachmaninoff stuck to his stylistic principles, but died too soon to see himself vindicated in the neo-Romanticism of the late 20th century. The work even has references to jazz, with swingy syncopations and a bluesy saxophone solo that was originally intended as a vocal solo for Marian Anderson.
The exact genre of the Symphonic Dances is as ambiguous as its emotional world. Rachmaninoff originally meant the three movements to be called “Noon,” “Twilight,” and “Midnight,” but abandoned the idea as the music began to go its own way and resist conformity to a “program.” As for the “dance” aspect of the work, Rachmaninoff certainly meant the pieces to have a dancelike character, one which builds toward the grim energy of the ending; he even corresponded with Michel Fokine (who had choreographed Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a work that also offers quotations from the “Dies irae”) about the possibility of transforming the Symphonic Dances into a ballet. But Fokine, after predicting “the joy of creating dances to your music,” died in 1942, only six months before Rachmaninoff’s own death from cancer.
Unlike the orchestral dances of Brahms and Kodály, these large-scale, self-contained movements are “dances” in only the most abstract, visionary sense. The “Tempo di valse” second movement in particular, with its weird chromatic effects, is more a danse macabre than a conventional waltz. The work is ultimately a symphony with dancelike elements—one of the most subtle and haunting, in fact, of all Rachmaninoff’s symphonic works.
Rachmaninoff was too exhausted and ill to compose anything after the Symphonic Dances. Indeed, his ability to complete the work—one so strangely invigorating for being so death-haunted—was apparently a surprise to him. “I don’t know how that happened,” he told friends. “That was probably my last flicker.” As the final work of the last authentic Russian Romantic, it is also the “last flicker” of a century-old tradition in symphonic music.
—Jack Sullivan