Jessie Montgomery tells stories. Perhaps all composers do, but Montgomery’s work comes with stories built in, backstories that explain the range and colors of her music. “Each piece has its own different needs”, she says. “But I want to communicate feelings and story. I write toward my own sense of timing, pacing, and my own sense of narrative.”
As a violinist and original member of New York City’s PUBLIQuartet, Montgomery accepted an unusual commission: to write a piece for tuba and strings for iron-lunged legend Bob Stewart – whose credits include playing with Taj Mahal and Charles Mingus (and fathering the quartet’s other violinist, Curtis Stewart). Three of the five movements of the resultant work, In Color (2014), were later arranged for percussion quartet by Sean Connors. With Third Coast Percussion, Connors has kept that iteration in regular performance rotation.
On 13th February, the Chicago-based quartet played Connors’ arrangement, Suite from In Color (along with Montgomery’s Lady Justice/Black Justice, the Song, 2024), at 92NY on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. With melodica, bowed marimba, and small cymbals dipped in water, the piece finds inventive ways again and again to address the missing sustain of the strings. They also devised a way of playing crotales against a drum head, creating a talking drum sound which they dubbed the ‘Montgomery effect’.
“Honestly, I just gave them the music, and they came up with the arrangement themselves”, Montgomery says. “We talked a little bit about it, we did a little workshopping on bell choices and how to execute certain string techniques, or maybe what the overall effect of the desired string technique was, and then they took that and then found instruments appropriate to that sound.
“With percussion, it’s like you don’t know what you’re going to get sometimes. It’s like, ‘Oh, look, we can put this wooden grated stick onto this weird barrel, and it's going to make this cool sound’. It's always an experimental process”.
Further adaptations include humming and whistling, and keying in on certain sections that Connors thought would work well for percussion, such as a ‘lopsided ostinato’ highlighted in the second movement of the suite.
“She doesn’t stand on ceremony”, he says. “She was not precious about any of her ideas. I said, ‘Are you OK with extracting certain things?’ and she said, ‘sure, yeah, go with it’.”
Third Coast also gave the premiere of Montgomery’s Study No. 1 (2023), her first percussion piece, and future collaborations are planned. “We’re now close buddies”, Connors says. “We’re thrilled that she’s based in Chicago now and hope that we can continue to be her percussion muses.”
Born in New York City in 1981 to a composer father and poet/playwright mother, Montgomery earned a degree in violin performance from Juilliard and a master’s in composition for film from New York University. From the beginning, her career has balanced performance and equitable education. From 2021 to 2024, she was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence and she formerly oversaw the symphony’s Young Composers Institute while teaching composition and music technology at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.
“I take into account the kids’ ethnicity and socioeconomic status and experiences that they’ve had in music”, Montgomery says. “I try to provide a space for them if they haven’t had as many resources. I have a mix of students, some who have a lot of resources and this is another extracurricular activity for them, and for some this may be a very new experience.”
Along with co-founding PUBLIQuartet, Montgomery was a member of the highly regarded Catalyst Quartet. In recent years, her focus has shifted from performance to composition. She’s been performed by the Atlanta Symphony, the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Royal Concertgegouw Orchestra, among others.
In January, the New York Philharmonic included her Strum (2006/12) in its Radio City Music Hall debut, and in March the American Composers Orchestra performed Montgomery’s Procession for percussion and orchestra at Carnegie Hall, as part of the United in Sound: America at 250 festival.
This summer, the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra will give the UK premiere of These Righteous Paths, a concerto written for Abel Selaocoe, following performances in Berlin, Brussels, Toronto and Wrocław.
Writing the concerto involved new kinds of storytelling, being sensitive to the instrument while playing to Selaocoe’s highly personal style. “It can be very easy to cover the cello with orchestration”, she says. “If you think about the range of the cello, it’s essentially in the middle of the keyboard in proportion to the low and upper ranges.”
On top of that, the work called for allowing for “the other textures and techniques that Abel brings, making sure that there’s room for all of the singing, his vocalizations, and other aspects of his toolbox to shine through”. The concerto may have taken some specialized adaptation, but for Montgomery, that’s part of the work.
“When I sit down to do the work of composing, it’s like making sure that I don’t block myself from any new ideas, letting fresh ideas come through, not self-editing, ever, until the very end,” Montgomery says. “I think that's a common issue with most creative people, you’re trying to control the outcome while you’re building the ship. For me right now, it’s just letting whatever ideas come out, and not trying to tailor them to the way I used to write a piece or to another piece that I’ve written before, or try to make it fit into any pre-existing mold that I might have created for myself. The point is that the music communicates something to us, that the listener can explore their own imagination while they listen to the music.”
According to Bachtrack’s listings statistics, Montgomery is now one of the most frequently performed living composers and composers of colour by orchestras around the world. (It’s notable that the South African Selaocoe also ranks among the fastest growing in prominence.) While acknowledging a marked change in programming in the years following the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, she noted that the swing toward equity doesn’t carry a guarantee for the future.
“What’s important is that everyone pursue it, regardless of what the trends are”, she says. “We’ve created a trend, which is good for people to see up front. But the future of where we’re headed depends on people deciding for themselves, individually, that they actually care about this, that it actually means something to them to maintain support for these really integral voices within our field.
“Some people will bear down and say, no, we’re going to keep our commitments to diversity and continue to keep this door open, because it’s what's fair and it’s what’s interesting about our art. We can have so much, so many different points of view, and contain all those points of view. We have the capacity in the art form to do so. I think it depends on people maintaining that attitude. I’m not in the room with all of these artistic planning committees, but I can see from the outside that they are waning a little bit in some cases”.
Her personal musical storytelling, however, isn’t so pointed. “In my own work, and the messaging in my own work, there’s not a mission there, in terms of ‘You must hear about Black stories, otherwise, or else.’ I’m telling my story, and I acknowledge the timing and the world we’re in.”
These Righteous Paths, the new cello concerto, contains a story from a different perspective, in the form of her mother Robbie McCauley’s poetry. One of those poems, named simply ‘Title?’, begins with the lines “I want a new song / Beautifully sung / About something more.” McCauley passed away in 2021, but Montgomery says that what this “new song” would be about is the same for both herself and her mother.
“No more war,” she says bluntly. “Fuck war... no more war. I mean, just do something new. Let’s do something else, imagine something else. Imagine all the people living lives in peace. I didn’t grow up in the 60s. I don’t know what it was like, but I feel like that’s where we’re at. We did a spiral backwards, and now we’ve got to make a new song out of the old song and create something new.”
