Jessie Montgomery gets ready for her Chicago ‘Homecoming’

Where do a composer’s inspirations come from? For Jessie Montgomery, who has played classical violin since she was a child, a new sound or melody might arrive as her fingers are musing playfully across the strings. But an idea also could stem from something she heard, way back when, in Manhattan’s East Village, where she grew up with her mother, Robbie McCauley, an actress and storyteller, and her father, Ed Montgomery, a jazz saxophonist and composer who ran the Context Studios, where musicians of all kinds gathered to jam and record. 

Montgomery, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence, appointed in April by Music Director Riccardo Muti, talks easily about the heady mix of theatrical and musical influences that she consciously summons as she composes. To this day, she finds herself influenced by the many styles of music and the ways they “bump into each other,” as she puts it: "Different elements competing, but then finding each other, that’s interesting to me." Encouraged by an early teacher, Montgomery began improvising on her violin and writing down her first creations when she was 11 years old.  

The world premiere of Montgomery’s first CSO commission for full orchestra, as yet untitled, is set for April 28. "The opportunity to work with Maestro Muti is one in a million, and I just wanted to write my violin teacher and tell her, ’Guess what happened?’ " she recalled during a break in Grainger Ballroom, where she was able to share some thoughts about the opportunity that awaits. 

"It’s a proud moment. I want to write a good piece. I’m going to have some chances to hear the orchestra more and more and more, and to get to know the players, and to write a piece that’s really designed specifically for them." 

Although most probably think of composers as scribbling ideas with a pen, it’s probably just as accurate in Montgomery’s case to imagine her creating with that violin in her hand, or nearby. “I actually use my violin as a way to improvise, to play around with some of my own ideas,” she said. "I call it my creative music time, and I’m not necessarily writing anything down. I’m taking maybe some small notes about patterns and ideas that keep coming forward, but it’s really just a time to reconnect with the physicality of playing. I do make that a priority, because the music is going to be performed by another human being. That’s an important thing to maintain." 

Muti’s history of composer-in-residence appointments suggests a tendency to go young and now tilts female. In 2010, he appointed Mason Bates (b. 1977) and Anna Clyne (b. 1980). They were followed in 2015 by Samuel Adams (b. 1985) and Elizabeth Ogonek (b. 1989). Missy Mazzoli (b. 1981) was appointed in 2018. Past composers-in-residence include John Corigliano, Shulamit Ran, Augusta Read Thomas, Osvaldo Golijov and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

A Juilliard grad and a current graduate fellow in composition at Princeton University, Montgomery allocates three to four hours a day to composing. Aspiring composers, take heed: “Making sure that I have that sacred time allotted is really super important.” 

One of her major duties with the CSO will be to curate MusicNOW, the contemporary series aimed at people who are curious about the latest boundary-pushing works. Her first CSO MusicNOW concert, scheduled for Nov. 1, features selected CSO players and is aptly titled “Homecoming,” as it will resound from the Orchestra Hall stage, with tickets on the main floor and lower balcony at the welcoming price of $20. Two of Montgomery’s vocal works, Loisaida, My Love and Lunar Songs, are on that first concert.

Classical-music lovers may well hear the sounds of Lunar Songs as coming out of the European lieder tradition. “But underneath, there are some suggestions of a walking bass and other rhythmic elements working with and against that very languid vocal line,” Montgomery said. There’s some New York sound in there, too, she suggests, and she goes for subtle integration, "like in an impressionistic painting, where the figures are blurred over, but it’s very clear what the figures are." You can hear the same vitality, the freshness of another cultural point of view, in Banner, Montgomery’s popular symphonic meditation on The Star-Spangled Banner, which was performed all over the country this summer, and in her own cadenza to Haydn’s Second Cello Concerto. 

On Montgomery’s national horizon is an experimental workshop premiere at Lincoln Center Theater, which is incubating new pieces for the stage, in cooperation with the Metropolitan Opera. A COVID-delayed production of Scott Joplin’s 1911 ragtime-era opera Treemonisha, which Montgomery has arranged and refitted with her own orchestration, is anticipated at Stanford University in early 2022 and several other U.S. locations. Publishing that opera bankrupted the African American Joplin, who died in 1917 and then was buried in a pauper’s grave. But the work is indeed a bold theatrical piece that fuses classical, gospel, folk and ragtime, and its rediscovery in the 1970s was of such significance that the Pulitzer Prize Board posthumously awarded Joplin a Special Citation in 1976.

Despite her many commitments, Montgomery has remained a loyal performer with the Silkroad Ensemble, founded by Yo-Yo Ma, and she is a champion of the Sphinx Organization, an arts incubator based in Detroit. Sphinx helps musicians of color acquire technical skills and professional know-how that can lead to successful auditions at major symphony orchestras and other opportunities in the classical-music field. Back in 2010, Sphinx founded the Catalyst Quartet with Montgomery as a member. (YouTube preserves this time-capsule memory of her, seated in the second violin position, performing in one of her own most popular works, Strum.)

The pandemic has been a stressful time for all musicians, of course. Several months ago, New Music USA recorded a YouTube chat between Montgomery and fellow composer Julia Adophe, while they were both confined to their solitary studios during the COVID-19 pandemic. Montgomery talked about how isolated she first felt, cooped up with important deadlines looming and waiting for the ideas to spring forth. But then she said she was reminded of how lucky she was to have her dad around when she was a child, to help her when she got stuck trying to master something on the violin. He had good rituals, she recalls, practicing the saxophone every day in the same way, and during the same hours, and he also was adept at creative ways to keep working at a problem when the going got rough. 

"He’d suggest trying to play the tune upside down, and/or backwards," said Montgomery, who decided to switch gears and try something like that during the pandemic. She treated her days like summer camp, “with a time to play, a time to relax,” and she let herself daydream, and the ideas came. “Just reclaiming that creative play, the process of anti-reasoning,” as she put it, made it possible for her to get going again. 

Among the composers who interest Montgomery are the 20th-century masters Bartók, Debussy and Britten, but she also has a personal fondness for Thelonious Monk jazz recordings. “I do listen to those casually, just to let the music seep in,” she said. "I just love how he uses harmony, and how he’s always coming from a place that was so new [at the time] and still has that quality of feeling new. It’s always surprising. It doesn’t go where you would expect it to go. And yet it is so simple in terms of his approach to the instrument. I think that he cracked a code, where something can be simple, and yet really unexpected and complex in a lot of ways."

In her CSO post, Montgomery will be spending considerable time in Chicago, the adopted hometown of composer Florence Price, whom she has called “the godmother of Black music.” Price, the first African American woman to have a work performed by a major orchestra, was born in 1887 in Little Rock, and she arrived in Chicago with her family as part of the Great Migration. “I can definitely envision a big Florence Price celebration, involving key programming events, but we’re still figuring a lot of that out."

One of Montgomery’s own compositions, Sergeant McCauley, for wind quintet and string quartet, also captured a piece of that Great Migration saga: McCauley was Montgomery’s great-grandfather and a Buffalo Soldier, the nickname for Black cavalry regiments of the U.S. Army, which existed from from 1867 to 1896. His life story was the stuff of family lore that Montgomery has turned into music. 

That saga also has inspired what will be her first opera. “The Buffalo Soldiers were also simultaneously participating in the Great Migration,” she said in a recent interview with Strings magazine. “I’m charting his path during that time in the early 1900s, trying to find songs — from the regions of America he traveled in — to use as anchors for moments in the opera. I like that multi-dimensional way of looking at a piece.”