Montgomery is a native New Yorker, a graduate of the Juilliard School in violin performance, and holds a master\u2019s degree from New York University in music composition.\u00a0 Her publications focus on various combinations of strings, and enjoy wide performance popularity with noted ensembles throughout the country.\u00a0 She is a devoted supporter of educational activities, and youth musical ensembles.\u00a0\u00a0 Her musical style is, if anything eclectic, and is obviously a reflection of the enormous variety of musical art in her native New York City.\u00a0 Mahler once somewhat fatuously remarked something to the effect that a symphony should contain \u201ceverything.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Well, Montgomery dips into a remarkable universe of musical traditions, and reinterprets them in her own voice\u2014just not all in one piece, of course.<\/p>\n
Starburst<\/em> was written in 2012 for the \u201cSphinx Virtuosi,\u201d the professional touring ensemble of the Sphinx Organization.\u00a0 The latter supports young African-American string players in the Detroit area; Montgomery is composer-in-residence for the organization. Starburst<\/em> takes its title from the composer\u2019s feeling that the young members of the \u201cSphinx Virtuosi\u201d are rather like \u201cnew stars in a galaxy.\u201d<\/p>\n A brief, but scintillating, affair, Starburst<\/em> is a winsome example of much of new music of the twenty-first century.\u00a0 Montgomery is typical of young contemporary composers unhindered by the siren calls that dominated \u201cacademic\u201d music of the second half of the twentieth century:\u00a0 complexity, dissonance, adherence to \u201csystems,\u201d and a general tendency to value art that is esoteric and recondite.\u00a0 Rather, the cheerful staccato perpetual motion and constant interplay of a seemingly endless variety of ideas and motives creates a vivacious sparkle that perfectly encapsulates the title of the work.\u00a0\u00a0 While not exactly clearly establishing a \u201ckey\u201d for the audience, Starburst<\/em> is a pleasant exploration of familiar scales, chords, arpeggios, and melodic ideas that anyone can enjoy and recognize.\u00a0 But, of course, adroitly woven together into quite a new composition.\u00a0 Who should know better than the composer herself how to describe it?<\/p>\n “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, \u201cthe rapid formation of large numbers of new stars in a galaxy at a rate high enough to alter the structure of the galaxy significantly,\u201d 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.”<\/em><\/p>\n —<\/em>Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n \u00a92021 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[143],"class_list":["post-360","program_note","type-program_note","status-publish","hentry","program_note_tax-jessiemontgomery"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note\/360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/program_note"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}