COMPOSER-PERFORMER

Jessie Montgomery

Composer-Performers

Grammy

Award-winning composer

Musical America

2023 Composer of the Year

Sphinx

Medal of Excellence

United States Artists

Creative Impact Award

ABOUT

Jessie Montgomery is a Grammy Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator. Her work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, establishing her as an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year, Montgomery’s profound compositions 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.

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 a child of the radical New York City cultural scene of the 1980s and 90s. Her growing catalog includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works, as well as an opera in development with Lincoln Center Theater and The Metropolitan Opera, and Chemiluminescence (2025), a new orchestral work co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Bravo! Vail Music Festival, and the Sphinx Organization.

Part of a series of pieces inspired by the plays and poems of Montgomery’s mother, Robbie McCauley – who was a leading figure in the Black theater movement in post-Civil Rights-era America – Montgomery’s new concerto for solo cello and orchestra, These Righteous Paths, was written for and in collaboration with South African cellist Abel Selaocoe. These Righteous Paths is making an unprecedented global impact through a consortium of worldwide orchestra performances across multiple seasons by co-commissioners Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Klarafestival, Narodowe Forum Muzyki, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra at the BBC Proms, Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, Aspen Music Festival and School, Oregon Symphony, Utah Symphony, and the NTR Zaterdagmatinee.

Read full biography

Montgomery is a founding member of the Blacknificent 7, a composer collective focused on presenting and supporting the works of Black composers through concert curation, scholarship, and mentorship. Montgomery’s interest in improvisation and collective music-making has led to the development of The Everything Band, which is comprised of an all-star cast of nine composer-performers with varied stylistic backgrounds, including Montgomery and Jannina Norpoth on violin, Gabriel Cabezas on cello, Eleonore Oppenheim on bass, Allison Loggins-Hull on flute, Lynn Ligammari on saxophone, Pascal Le Boeuf on piano, Grey McMurray on guitar, and Michael W. Davis on drums. With longtime collaborator bassist Eleonore Oppenheim, she also created the genre-bending improv duo, big dog little dog.

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. Recent collaborations include a recording and touring project with Third Coast Percussion, including a newly commissioned percussion quartet and an appearance with Montgomery as the featured soloist in Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra. From choral-symphonic works such as I Have Something To Say (2019) to her more intimate solo instrumental works, she presents a fresh perspective on the contemporary concert music experience. In response to Montgomery’s Grammy-winning work, Rounds (2021), San Francisco’s NPR station KQED stated: “This is what classical music needs.”

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 she still leads today, supporting 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 previously served on the Composition and Music Technology faculty at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, and has also served on the music faculty at Bard College Conservatory of Music and the composition and violin faculty at Mannes School of Music at The New School.

Montgomery’s music has been heard on global stages across the United States, Canada, Central America, Europe, and Asia, from the Hong Kong Cultural Center to the BBC Proms, Elbphilharmonie, Hollywood Bowl, and Carnegie Hall. Highlights include Song of Nzingha (2024), part of soprano Karen Slack’s evening-length recital African Queens, alongside other composers from the Blacknificent 7; Procession (2024), a percussion concerto written for Cynthia Yeh, Principal Percussionist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Space (2023), commissioned and performed by violinist Joshua Bell as part of his The Elements project; Five Freedom Songs (2021), a song cycle conceived with and written for soprano Julia Bullock for the Sun Valley, Grand Teton, and Virginia Arts Music Festivals and San Francisco, Kansas City, Boston, and New Haven Symphony Orchestras; and an ongoing collaboration with choreographer Pam Tanowitz, which has led to several of her concert works being choreographed by major dance companies across the U.S., including the Nashville Ballet and the Miami City Ballet, as well as I was waiting for the echo of a better day, a site-specific collaboration with Bard SummerScape. Her work also extends to film, including the original score for the 2022 documentary Loudmouth, co-composed with Joel Goodman and nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy Award in 2024.

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. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence, and she was the Curtis Institute of Music’s Composer-in-Residence for the 2025-26 season. Montgomery holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at Princeton University.

For more information, visit www.jessiemontgomery.com.