World Premiere: September 2012
Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO’s first performance of this work.
Instrumentation: Strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass
Duration: 3'
Starburst for String Orchestra (2012)
Violinist, composer and music educator Jessie Montgomery, who began a three-year term as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in July 2021, started studying violin at age four at the Third Street Music School Settlement in her native New York City. She was composing and improvising by age eleven, and while still in high school twice received the Composer’s Apprentice Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Montgomery went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in violin performance at the Juilliard School and a master’s from New York University in film scoring and multimedia; she has also studied composition with Derek Bermel and Steven Burke and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. In 2020, she was appointed to the faculty of the Mannes School of Music in New York. As a performer and educator, Montgomery was a co-founding member of PUBLIQuartet (an ensemble made up of composers and arrangers, featuring their own music as well as that of other New York-based composers), a member of the Catalyst Quartet and Providence String Quartet (dedicated to using music as a means of exploring possibilities for social change in underserved communities in the Providence area, where she taught violin, improvisation and composition to Community MusicWorks students), a faculty member of the Apple Hill Center in New Hampshire, Music at Port Milford in Canada, and Third Street Music School Settlement in New York, and a long-time affiliated artist with Sphinx, an organization that supports young African-American and Latino string players, in which she was a two-time laureate; she is also currently an active participant in the New York classical and new music scenes. As a composer, Montgomery has created works for concert, theater and film (one of which was in collaboration with her father, Ed Montgomery, also a composer and an independent film producer), and held residencies with the Deer Valley Music Festival, New York Youth Symphony, American Composers Orchestra and Sphinx Virtuosi. Among her rapidly accumulating distinctions are the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence. Jessie Montgomery is currently working on a commission for Project 19, the New York Philharmonic’s multi-year celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states the following year, which granted women the right to vote. The Philharmonic began premiering these new compositions by 19 women composers in February 2020. In September 2021, Montgomery was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera along with two other Black composers—Valerie Coleman and Joel Thompson—to develop new works in collaboration with the Lincoln Center Theater.
Jessie Montgomery wrote, “The brief one-movement Starburst for string orchestra is a play on imagery of rapidly changing musical colors. Exploding gestures are juxtaposed with gentle fleeting melodies in an attempt to create a multidimensional soundscape. A common definition of a starburst—‘the rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly’—lends itself almost literally to the performing ensemble who premiered the work: The Sphinx Virtuosi.”
The Sphinx Virtuosi is the touring ensemble of the Sphinx Organization, which addresses the underrepresentation of people of color in classical music though training and performance opportunities.
©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda