Jessie Montgomery
Program Notes by Tim Munro
Miller Theatre commissioned the acclaimed writer and musician Tim Munro to write profiles of the composers featured onstage this season, with the goal of connecting listeners to both the creator and their music.
We start high in the mountains. Rivulets wind their way tentatively through nooks and crannies. Who knows whether they will survive or indeed thrive. But soon they gather, connect, beginning to flow with direction, with purpose. Into river, into ocean.
This program identifies several streams of Jessie Montgomery’s activity over the past decade. Works for quartet, works for voice, works for friends. Works that broke Montgomery’s language open. Works that connected with her musical and personal identities. Works that sought joy, connection, energy.
“This program is about developing my community of collaborators,” says Montgomery. “It is about developing a way of working. Each of the pieces here is representative of a relationship, of people I had been working with—giving a chronological view of how these elements came together.”
Finally these streams connect, are pulled by a single strong current towards the inauguration of a new ensemble, The Everything Band. This ensemble ties together Montgomery’s skills, interests, and values. It is joyful music-making in a large chamber music group, centering improvisation and creative formal thinking.
In many ways, all of Montgomery’s creative work leads towards the formation of this ensemble.
“This program is about developing my community of collaborators...Each of the pieces here is representative of a relationship, of people I had been working with—giving a chronological view of how these elements came together.”
Childhood
Montgomery’s childhood home was a vibrant, resonating thing. “When I was a little kid, up until I was about three years old, my dad’s music studio was in our apartment. Half of the house was for living and half was for music-making. Musicians would come over, and spend some of their time babysitting me.”
She was surrounded by the stuff of a musical life. Doing homework in her dad’s studio. Attending classes that her mother taught. Hanging out in dressing rooms. Touring with her parents. “On the road with my violin, doing my homework, and hanging out with a bunch of adult artists.”
Being surrounded by musicians and music-making, she fell in love with the idea of being a professional musician. “It was romanticized, but I had the impression that everyone was making art and was happy and free. There was always room for cynicism and jokes. It was about being entirely themselves.”
Voice
The two songs on this program tell stories about Montgomery’s past and future. Each are in different ways odes to her childhood home on the Lower East Side. And these two works point towards future paths, as Montgomery takes a dive headfirst into the world of opera.
Loisaida, My Love sets a text by Bimbo Rivas, a poet, activist, and community builder. The poem pays homage to his home, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Rivas “became a hero of the Lower East Side,” says Montgomery, “bringing it out of the ashes of neglect and decay that had taken over in the previous decades. Loisaida is an ode to the community he loved and fought for.”
Rather than voice and accompaniment, Montgomery thinks of this work as a duet for soprano and cello, with these two equal voices in free and open conversation with one another.
I love you.
You’er my lady fair.
No matter where I am,
I think of you!
Lunar Songs sets a text by the poet, critic, and performer J. Mae Barizo. The work, says Montgomery, is “a tone poem and a reflective tribute to Bernstein and all he encompassed in his relationship to New York City.”
All empires end; we’re empire
Now. New song: disturb the peace.
To our children you will be
both past and future: a seed.
Montgomery’s immersion in vocal music had to wait a little. “We spend so much time as instrumentalists thinking about the physics of our instruments,” she says, but for a vocalist, their instrument is the human body. “I have had to learn about this instrument, to make musical connections with the physical nature of singing.”
For Montgomery there is no one idealized singing voice. There are only the voices of individual singing humans. For instance, the voice of Alicia Hall Moran, a multi-faceted musician with “such a unique interpretive quality to her work,” says Montgomery. “She brings herself and her interpretation to the front of the process.”
This openness matches the freedom in Montgomery’s approach. “I write in a way where there is expressive room, so that there can be a more naturalistic tone to the words. I can help shape things, but I really appreciate more when the musician comes in with their own unique bent on things.”
These songs were the first projects that Montgomery wrote for musicians that would become part of The Everything Band. “Those songs fell in at moments where I was sort of opening up, starting to let myself be a little bit less self-conscious about my musical choices. Writing for people I know, I feel freer with my ideas.”
“Montgomery is constantly chasing the energy and curiosity of youth. 'When I write music,' she says, 'I try to think I am writing music for young players. Finding that sense of abandon. Tapping into a youthful kind of levity.'”
Bringing the spirit
Montgomery is constantly chasing the energy and curiosity of youth. “When I write music,” she says, “I try to think I am writing music for young players. Finding that sense of abandon. Tapping into a youthful kind of levity.”
Montgomery loved her upbringing in classical music. She says the word “love” many times in discussing it. “I had music school almost every day after school and all day on Saturday.” The violin was her constant companion. “Just anytime, anywhere, I would open my case and start playing. It was second nature.”
She points to one example, a Baroque ensemble led by William Dickerson. “He was the most enthusiastic person that I had encountered. He had excitement and inspiration in every bone in his body. The spirit of that music-making—the phrasing and lightness and energy—is still filtering into my pieces.”
Break Away
Later, the formality of classical music did have an effect. “It was really a late onset condition,” says Montgomery, “beginning somewhere around my undergraduate degree. I found myself approaching composition from the same brain that was programmed to think that ‘Mozart has to be performed this way and Brahms has to be performed this way.’”
But soon there were other, welcome voices that came into Montgomery’s life. As a player she had her first experiences with improvisation. “I was very much learning it ‘on the job,’ playing with jazz musicians like [violinist and composer] Elektra Kurtis and [percussionist and composer of largeform works] Warren Smith.”
These varied experiences led Montgomery to reconsider her own ideas around free, spontaneous playing and formal structures. Montgomery’s own ensemble at the time, PUBLIQuartet, went through an evolution. “We were questioning ‘How Things Should Be,’ and then cracking it open.” They were beginning to more seriously incorporate improvisation into their work.
Break Away came at a crucial moment. “It was where I started trying to balance freedom with tighter notated aspects.’” A series of improvisations formed the raw material of the work. The quartet riffed on different styles of music—hip-hop, electronica, contemporary classical techniques—and Montgomery crafted these into a work combining improvised and notated aspects.
The score asks the quartet to “break away” from the score at various points. Montgomery was seeking “a dialogue between the written score and the whims of the quartet, in which the piece takes on further transformation at each performance.”
Source Code
A later string quartet allowed Montgomery a new kind of questioning, a new kind of cracking open. “Source Code was one of the first pieces where I was able to self-identify in some way in the music.”
The commission, from the Cassatt Quartet, asked her to reflect on the question: What does it mean to be American? “Posing that question in 2025 brings too many issues,” she says, “but at the time I was able to use it as a way of diving into my own heritage. I spent time learning about the major influences of Black music on American culture.”
The process began with Montgomery transcribing sources from Black artists in the Civil Rights era. She came to identify the spiritual as the common musical origin. “The spiritual is a significant part of the DNA of Black folk music, and subsequently most (arguably all) American pop music forms that have developed to the present day.”
“If you are really trying to be present with your work, then your work is always changing. But then nothing can be taken for granted—it is like I am learning a new language every time I sit down.”
Terror of the page
Most creators recognize the fear. “The terror of the blank page is a real thing,” says Montgomery. “And it doesn't get easier with each new project. It is not like a muscle that you exercise and then can depend on to start a new piece.”
She has been trying to understand the root of this anxiety. “If you are really trying to be present with your work, then your work is always changing. But then nothing can be taken for granted—it is like I am learning a new language every time I sit down.”
There are strategies. “To get past the empty page I have been making up compositional exercises for myself.” The prompts tend to be quite technical, like ‘write four bars using one motive,’ or change the scale or mode.
And an important part of this is not to feel like the project is important, but rather the process. “I’m trying to get out of this project-based mentality, realizing that I'm a composer all the time.”
Montgomery is a multi-hyphenate artist in a classical world that loves boxes. “There have been multiple times along the way where people have asked like, ‘Oh, are you still playing the violin? Are you able to balance both?’” These questions frustrate Montgomery.
“The Everything Band ties together many of Montgomery’s ideas: 'wanting to collaborate, wanting to keep the music really fresh and on the surface, taking pressure off perfect execution, keeping it more spontaneous.'”
The Everything Band
The concept is simple: gather a group of bad-asses, a real all-star band. All gifted soloists and chamber musicians. All comfortable in both notated and improvised music-making. All seeking the communal joy of music-making.
The Everything Band ties together many of Montgomery’s ideas: “wanting to collaborate, wanting to keep the music really fresh and on the surface, taking pressure off perfect execution, keeping it more spontaneous.”
And equally important were personal relationships. “The essential piece for me was that I had close relationships with the people in the band,” says Montgomery, “that it felt sort of ‘familial’ in a way.”
Montgomery had been musing on the idea for a decade, having conversations casually, starting to put plans in place, but it wasn’t until lockdowns cleared everyone’s diaries that suddenly the concept was possible.
The band gathered for a residency in New Jersey. “It was three days, and the plan was to show up and play. I gave them charts—many things were free. Everyone was open and curious. It was this surreal and fun moment in all of the craziness that was going on in that time.”
At core is the notion of flexibility. “I can put a chart or a half-baked idea in front of this group of people and watch magic happen. It is fun for me to observe what happens when I hand ideas over to these people.”
“And that we all felt free to mess up.” Montgomery is humble about her skills as an improvisor. “I still feel that I have a lot to learn, but I am fortunate to be surrounded by these amazing musicians—having a core group where I feel comfortable messing up or playing something weird.”
All at once
There are layers to the “everything all at once” nature of the Everything, All at Once.
“There is the ‘everything’ of the band: the different styles that we bring to it all at once.
“There is the ‘everything’ in how we will execute it: how the approach to the piece will require all of us to be on the same page, to be ‘all in’.
“There is the ‘everything’ of the past few years of my life, which have been extremely ‘everything all at once.’ It has been a rattling and transformative time for me.”
The music of the suite is deeply personal. “In the past I have shied away from writing music that expresses my particular state of being. But this piece is different—it is crafted with a lot of strong and personal feelings in mind. I think the result of it will be something celebratory.