Composers

JESSIE MONTGOMERY is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. In May 2021, she began a three-year appointment as the MeadComposer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation and the Sphinx Medal of Excellence. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music,improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of twenty-first-century American sound and experience. Since 1999, Montgomery has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players, and she has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi. She holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. She is Professor of violin and composition at The New School. Five Freedom Songs was co-commissioned by the Sun Valley Music Festival, SanFrancisco Symphony, Boston Symphony, Grand Teton Music Festival, Kansas City Symphony, New Haven Symphony, and Virginia Arts Festival. It was conceived in collaboration with Julia Bullock, composed it in 2020, and premiered in August 2021 at the SunValley Music Festival. Montgomery described:

We wanted to create a song cycle that honors our shared African-American heritage and the tradition of the Negro spiritual, while also experimenting with non-traditional stylistic contexts. Each of the five songs in this cycle are sourced from the historical anthology Slave Songs of the United States (originally published by A. Simpson & Co., New York, 1867), which categorizes each songbased on origin and social context. For example, “My Lord, What a Morning” is actually the original lyric to the more popular spiritual “Stars Begin to Fall,” which also originated in the Southeastern slave states. “I Want to Go Home” also originates from the Southeastern states, and my setting is inspired by the simple way it was transcribed as a simple seven-note melody without an indicated rhythm, which inspired me to write it in a hybrid Gregorian chant/ spiritual style. “Lay dis Body Down,” a funeral song saidto originate from the region surrounding South Carolina, is set in an improvised style, wherein each part of the ensemble chooses theirown pacing of the line to create a swirling meditation. “My Father, How Long?” contains the refrain “We will soon be free, we will soon be free, De Lord will call us home,” the words of which reflect the dual meaning between spiritual salvation and freedom from oppression. It is a song that emerged from a jail in Georgetown, SC at the break of the Great Rebellion, and accompanied by percussive sounds in the strings evoking the chain gang. “The Day of Judgment” originates from the region surrounding Louisianaand is set as an uneasy celebration over the refrain of a traditional West African drumming pattern.

CASSIE KINOSHI is a Mercury Prize-nominated (2019) and Ivors Academy Award-winning (2018) Berlin/London-based composer, arranger and alto saxophonist with a focus on creating multi-disciplinarily and genre-blending performance. The composer states:

blue skies, bluer seas takes its name from the 1937 poem Cameo by Una Marson. She was a Jamaican writer, poet, the first Black woman BBC radio presenter, and a notable activist who spent many years of her life in London. Marson’s poetic work serves as a poignant source of inspiration for the piece, not only drawing from the vivid imagery of the poem but also, albeit loosely, from its form. Originally written as a gentle ode to the beauty and people of Marson’s homeland of Jamaica, the poem transcends its immediate context and also captures the rich tapestry of cultures and splendour of the natural landscapes found across many of the Caribbean islands. In mirroring the essence of Cameo, the piece seeks to create an ethereal, warm and stirring reflection on  the humanity and everyday lives of the inhabitants of the former ‘West Indian’ British colonies  alongside celebrating the depth of their alluring surroundings. blue skies, bluer seas invites listeners to  embark on a journey exploring heritage, nature and the everyday.

ALLISION LOGGINS-HULL is a flutist, composer, and producer whose work defies classification. She has worked across the spectrum of popular and classical music, including performances with Flutronix, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lizzo, Imani Winds, and Alarm Will Sound. Her music is resonant with social and political themes of the current moment, encompassing motherhood, Blackness, and cultural identity. During the 2021–22 season, she joins the Bang on a Can All-Stars for their annual People’s Commissioning Fund concert. With Flutronix, she premieres two projects: Black Being at the Arts Club of Chicago and Discourse with Carolina Performing Arts. Loggins-Hull composed Mama’s Little Precious Thing in 2018, commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Julia Bullock. The composer described:

Mama’s Little Precious Thing is inspired by Willie “Ma Willie” Abrams, one of the renowned quilters of Gee’s Bend [Alabama], and her “Roman Stripes” quilts. Her granddaughter, Louise Williams, described her as a quiet woman, but in the presence of an infant or young child, that would change and she “would just light up.” She was known for comforting and improvising lullabies to thesechildren and many times she used the words “Mama’s little precious thing.”

Williams says, “Even though Ma Willie was a very quiet person, there was strength in her quietness. She was born in 1897 in a small country town in Alabama, where, even though slavery had officially been over for years, many were still living in the aftermath of it. I believe she was quiet not because she didn’t have anything to say, but because she came from a world where you did not speak until you were spoken to.” Mama’s Little Precious Thing borrows stylings from lullabies (the piece opens with a play on Brahms’s lullaby) and traditional Black southern musical idioms including the blues and call-and-response. Informed by her “Roman Stripes”pieces, the string ensemble often represents her use of vertical (pizzicati) and horizontal (long and sustained) lines.

CAROLYN YARNELL '89, a composer, writer, and visual artist, expands the realm of classic beauty through sight and sound. She finds her sources of inspiration in nature, science, and in the spectrum of human experience. A native Californian, she is a graduate from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Yale. She has received a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Rome Prize, among other awards. Yarnell has written of her work:

A thousand words unspoken, my art is both an expression of, and liberation from, this material world that my restless soul has found itself temporarily but so inextricably bound up in. Being a visual artist, my music explores color and form through the depths of emotion. Being a musician, in my visual work I draw from the formal techniques and the spontaneity of classicalmusical composition, incorporating counterpoint, tonal harmony and improvisation to create both linear and vertical depth. My works are not clear representations of places or things, they are rather like fleeting frozen moments perceived from great distances through the curved lens of time.

I Come Up The Hard Way and ain’t my home were composed for Julia Bullock, in part during a 2022 residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, which the composer gratefully acknowledges. Yarnell described:

The philosophy of Nellie Mae Rowe and Sue Willy Seltzer deeply move me, and by a miracle their words were gifted through the realms of time for me to set to music. Humble as dust, transcendent to the stars, these noble souls convey genuine gratitude for every experience life presented, looking to the beyond. No matter how difficult circumstances seem, if even the tiniest detail were altered at any point in time, none of us would have made it here to this place in history.

“I call it ‘the hard way,’ but God still brought me here, and I thank him.” —Sue Willie Seltzer

PAMELA Z is a composer, performer, and media artist making works for voice, electronic processing, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can, Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds, Venice Biennale, and Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird. Her awards include the Rome Prize, United States Artists, the Guggenheim, Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Herb Alpert Award. Quilt was written in 2022 based on excerpts from interviews with five quilters from Gee’s Bend, AL, featured inthe film While I Yet Live by Maris Curran. The composer described:

When Julia contacted me about composing a piece for her History’s Persistent Voice project, she forwarded a number of links to texts, sound files, and videos that might serve as inspiration for the music or sources for the libretto. Among them was a short documentaryfilm by Maris Curran about a group of quilters in a small Alabama town. I was immediately struck by the sound of the women featuredin the film, and found a lot of music in their speaking voices.

Almost everything played by the orchestra and much of what Julia sings is taken from direct musical transcriptions of phrases spoken by Essie Pettway, Mary Lee Bendolph, Rita Mae Pettway, Lucy Mingo, China Pettway, and Mary Ann Pettway, whose voices I sampled and used to create the “tape” part of this work. It is a frequent practice of mine to find melodic and rhythmic motifs in speech sounds and build musical structures from them. I often cut them into very small fragments—words, syllables, even just phonemes—so that they transform into something quite abstract. But, in this case, I felt compelled to keep the speech fragmentsmore intact, and allow the women’s stories to come through more clearly.

TANIA LEÓN was born in Havana, Cuba, and is a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral work Stride,commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Recent commissioners include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Symphony Orchestra, and International Contemporary Ensemble. Green Pastures was composed in 2018, inspired by the words and art of Thornton Dial (1928–2016). The composer wrote:

Green Pastures was inspired by my thoughts after reading a series of statements made by Thornton Dial in interviews. I was moved by his humility, and by his love of nature as he grew up. His statements touched on the experiences he received thanks to many jobs he held when he was young, and on his attraction to collecting objects. Many of these objects were later included in his art pieces and sculptures, including the workers’ gloves which depict dead birds hanging from a clothesline in Green Pastures: The Birds That Didn’t Learn How To Fly. His words became the central spine of the piece, inspiring the music I created to highlight his powerful perspective.

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