New Music Premieres promotes contemporary classical music. Great art illuminates the time in which it was written. While the most popular classical music was composed long ago, there are many great works being written today. Every year Anchorage Chamber Music Festival selects a contemporary work to be performed at one of the festival concerts.
Hear us perform Jessie Montgomery's work Strum
Friday, August 3, 2024 // 7:30 PM
Made in America
UAA Fine Arts Building, Recital Hall
Kenji Bunch: String Circle
Vladimir Scolnic: Tensions…Wonder
R. Michael Daugherty: “Quem Genuit Maria”
Nathan Prillaman: Funk
Phillip Sink: Selections from Leave a Comment
Douglas Hofstadter: Good People All and Little Prelude in e min
Karalyn Schubring: Ignite
Frank Stemper: Good Night Moon
Jon Jeffrey Grier: The Lion, the Ass, and the Fox
Lowell Liebermann: Romance, Etude and Chorale
Julie Zhu: fulgura frango
Horacio Fernández: Güiro
Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness. Montgomery is an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life,” (The Washington Post) and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence. She was named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year.
Montgomery’s music contains a breadth of musical depictions of the human experience—from statements on social justice themes, to the Black diasporic experience and its foundation in American music, to wistful adorations and playful spontaneity—reflective of her deeply rooted experience as a classical violinist and child of the radical New York City cultural scene of the 1980s and 90s. In response to Montgomery’s GRAMMY®-winning work, Rounds (2021), San Francisco’s NPR station KQED stated: “this is what classical music needs in 2024.” A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and a former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery is a frequent and highly engaged collaborator with performing musicians, composers, choreographers, playwrights, poets, and visual artists alike.
At the heart of Montgomery’s work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists. During her tenure at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, she launched the Young Composers Initiative, which supports high school-aged youth in creating and presenting their works, including regular tutorials, reading sessions, and public performances. Her curatorial work engages a diverse community of concertgoers and aims to highlight the works of underrepresented composers in an effort to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces.
Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. Since 1999, she has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization in a variety of roles, including Composer-in-Residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, its professional touring ensemble. Montgomery holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at Princeton University. She serves on the Composition and Music Technology faculty at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.
Learn more about Jessie Montgomery on the composer’s website.