Montgomery: Coincident Dances

by Chris Vaneman

Composer Jessie Montgomery (1981 - )

Photo Credit: Jiyang Chen

To call Jessie Montgomery “in demand” these days is to engage in a truly comic understatement. Musical America’s 2022 Composer of the Year, she is also currently Composer in Residence for the Chicago Symphony, the Sphinx Virtuosi, and Bard College Conservatory – yes, all at once. This season her works will be performed by the orchestras in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, New York, and London, among many others. And this is someone who began her compositional career in earnest only about a decade ago, when she completed her Master’s at NYU in 2012.

Montgomery grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the daughter of a musician and a theatre artist. That neighborhood – which of course is as upscale and tony as most Manhattan Zip codes nowadays – was edgy and scruffy in those days, with avant-garde artists of all types sharing apartment buildings with New York’s urban poor. A talented and dedicated violin student, she was a freshman at Juilliard when she began working with the Sphinx Organization, a non-profit dedicating to integrating racial minorities into the world of classical music. Grant support from Sphinx enabled her to pursue a compositional career, and her star ascended quickly. Her music – which stirs aspects of the popular, Jazz, and Latin musical elements of the Lower East Side into the “melting pot” (her words, interestingly) of the classical tradition has met with immediate success and affection from audiences around the world.

Coincident Dances is inspired by the sounds found in New York’s various cultures, capturing the frenetic energy and multicultural aural palette one hears even in a short walk through a New York City neighborhood. The work is a fusion of several different sound-worlds: English consort, samba, mbira dance music from Ghana, swing, and techno.

My reason for choosing these styles sometimes stemmed from an actual experience of accidentally hearing a pair simultaneously, which happens most days of the week walking down the streets of New York, or one time when I heard a parked car playing Latin jazz while I had rhythm and blues in my headphones. Some of the pairings are merely experiments. Working in this mode, the orchestra takes on the role of a DJ of a multicultural dance track.

- Jessie Montgomery