Here’s a piece I heard last week on my drive home from work. I was immediately transfixed by its color and energy, to the point that I sat in my car in the driveway while it finished. The composer is Black American Jessie Montgomery, and the piece is called Starburst. It is written for string orchestra. It’s very short, only about three and a half minutes, but what a vibrant three and a half minutes they are!
Program notes (via):
Composer-violinist-educator Jessie Montgomery hails from New York’s Lower East Side, where her father managed a music studio. She was, in her words, “constantly surrounded by all different kinds of music.” Thus, her own compositions have drawn from many diverse influences, such as African-American spirituals, civil rights anthems, improvisational styles, modern jazz, film scoring, etc. From those early years, she developed, chiefly as a violinist, to receive degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University. In her professional performing life, Montgomery has been a member of the Providence String Quartet and the Catalyst Quartet. The latter began as a project of the Detroit-based Sphinx Organization, which creates opportunities for African-American and Latino string players.
As a composer, Montgomery was the resident Composer-Educator for the Albany Symphony during the 2015-16 season. In addition she has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the American Composers Orchestra, the Sphinx Organization, the Joyce Foundation, and the Sorel Organization. Her reputation has been spreading steadily, mainly in North America, beginning in New York City, Providence, and Boston, reaching out to Deer Valley, Utah; Miami Beach, Florida; Birmingham, Alabama; and Toronto, Ontario. Montgomery’s debut record album Strum: Music for Strings (including Starburst) was released on the Azica Records label in late 2015.
Starburst was commissioned by the Sphinx Organization and premiered by its resident Sphinx Virtuosi in 2012. About it, Montgomery writes:
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.
Program Notes by Dr. Michael Fink © 2020 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Here is Starburst. Enjoy! Play it twice! You’ve got time, and it’s good!
