Jessie Montgomery: Hymn for Everyone
Instrumentation: 2 flutes/piccolo, 2 oboes/english horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons/contrabassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 tenor trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani & percussion, and strings
Approximate duration: 12 minutes
To call Jessie Montgomery “in demand” in recent years is to engage in truly comic understatement. In the past four years, she’s been Musical America’s Composer of the Year, Performance Today’s Classical Woman of the Year, Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony, has won a Grammy Award, had commissions from the orchestras in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, London, and Berlin, and is currently completing a work for the Metropolitan Opera. And this is someone who began her composition career not much over 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 was edgy and scruffy in those days, with avant-garde artists of all kinds 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 dedicated to integrating racial minorities into the world of classical music. Grant support from Sphinx eventually enabled her to pursue a compositional career, and her star rose quickly. Her music – which stirs aspects of the popular, Jazz, and Latin musical elements of the Lower East Side into what she calls the “melting pot” of the classical tradition has met with immediate success among performers and critics, and affection from audiences around the world.
- Chris Vaneman
Hymn for Everyone is based on a hymn that I wrote during the spring of 2021 that was a reflection on personal and collective challenges happening at the time. Up until that point, I had resisted composing “response pieces” to the pandemic and social-political upheaval, and had been experiencing an intense writer’s block.
But one day, after a long hike, this hymn just came to me — a rare occurrence. The melody traverses through different orchestral “choirs”, and is accompanied by the rest of the ensemble. It is a kind of meditation for orchestra, exploring various washes of color and timbre through each repetition of the melody.
Jessie Montgomery