Run Time: Approx. 3 minutes

Jessie Montgomery is an American composer, violinist, and educator, and one of today’s most frequently performed living composers. Her work aims to capture the sound and spirit of the 21st-century American experience. She provides the following note for Starburst:

“This brief one-movement work 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 nature of the performing ensemble that premiered the work, the Sphinx Virtuosi, and I wrote the piece with their dynamic in mind.”

I will add only that the Sphinx Virtuosi are an ensemble affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, which seeks to increase representation in classical music and promote arts access for underrepresented people. Starburst imagines exactly the change Sphinx hopes to create: an explosive infusion of voices too often unheard in the classical music world.