Photo: © Todd Rosenberg Photography / Todd Rosenberg Photography
Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles.
Her music 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).
Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some
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”—for The
Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation, which was presented in its UK premiere
at the BBC Proms on 7 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, for Sun Valley
and Grand Teton Music Festivals, San Francisco and Kansas City Symphonies, Boston
and New Haven Symphony Orchestras, and the Virginia Arts Festival (7 August); a site-specific
collaboration with Bard SummerScape Festival and Pam Tanowitz Dance, I was waiting for the echo of a better day (8 July); and Passacaglia, a flute quartet for The National Flute Association’s 49th annual convention (13
August).
Since 1999, Jessie has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports
young African American and Latinx string players and has served as composer-in-residence
for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the Organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble.
A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and a former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Jessie
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 the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.