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beg. - mm. 14
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Skills & Techniques: Dynamic Contrast, Phrasing, Soft Playing, Slurring Flexibility
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Horn 1 (F)
All excerpts from Hymn for Everyone by Jessie Montgomery reprinted with permission.
Montgomery, Jessie: Hymn for Everyone
© Copyright 2021 Jessie Montgomery Music
NYC Music Services, sole publishing agent
Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved
Montgomery, Jessie: Hymn for Everyone
© Copyright 2021 Jessie Montgomery Music
NYC Music Services, sole publishing agent
Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2023)
Composer & Composition Information
Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981)
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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, making her 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.
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. 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 in 2024.” The text & image are reprinted from Jessie Montgomery's Website where more information about the composer can be found. |
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Hymn for Everyone
When she was named in April 2021 as Mead Composer-in-Residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Montgomery received three orchestral commissions from the CSO. The first was scheduled for performances this spring.
For her first commission, she thought about composing a suite for orchestra, a set of miniatures. A violinist trained at the Juilliard School, she was interested in developing new approaches to orchestrating the musical ideas she often first worked out on her violin. “Focusing on miniature pieces,” she said in an interview last fall, “I can experiment with a clear idea over a short period.”
Like just everyone else on the planet, Montgomery has been dealing with major upheavals, personal and professional, since the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. She turned 40 in December, and she had been re-evaluating her approach to composing. After growing up in a vibrantly artistic household in New York City’s Lower East Side, she is now a prolific, often-performed composer best known for colorful music that mixes all kinds of influences from traditional classical to the outer limits of improvised jazz and beyond. She began to question her belief that her pieces should always contain references to what she called the “unmistakably classical Western” tradition.
Then in May 2021, her mother, Robbie McCauley, a respected, boundary-pushing theater artist, died at age 78.
“Originally, I was working on an orchestral suite,” said Montgomery in a phone interview earlier this month. “Then I sort of switched mid-stream to reference back to this theme, this hymn, I had written during the pandemic, during the summer/fall of 2020. It was a vocal-like tune, and I had named it Hymn for Everyone. Then I thought maybe it might be something that would also have a lyrical aspect to it, which would be suited well to the really rich playing of the CSO. For my first piece out of the gate, I thought that would be a nice way to go.”
The text is written by & reprinted from Wynne Delacoma (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) where more information about the composition can be found.
For her first commission, she thought about composing a suite for orchestra, a set of miniatures. A violinist trained at the Juilliard School, she was interested in developing new approaches to orchestrating the musical ideas she often first worked out on her violin. “Focusing on miniature pieces,” she said in an interview last fall, “I can experiment with a clear idea over a short period.”
Like just everyone else on the planet, Montgomery has been dealing with major upheavals, personal and professional, since the full force of the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. She turned 40 in December, and she had been re-evaluating her approach to composing. After growing up in a vibrantly artistic household in New York City’s Lower East Side, she is now a prolific, often-performed composer best known for colorful music that mixes all kinds of influences from traditional classical to the outer limits of improvised jazz and beyond. She began to question her belief that her pieces should always contain references to what she called the “unmistakably classical Western” tradition.
Then in May 2021, her mother, Robbie McCauley, a respected, boundary-pushing theater artist, died at age 78.
“Originally, I was working on an orchestral suite,” said Montgomery in a phone interview earlier this month. “Then I sort of switched mid-stream to reference back to this theme, this hymn, I had written during the pandemic, during the summer/fall of 2020. It was a vocal-like tune, and I had named it Hymn for Everyone. Then I thought maybe it might be something that would also have a lyrical aspect to it, which would be suited well to the really rich playing of the CSO. For my first piece out of the gate, I thought that would be a nice way to go.”
The text is written by & reprinted from Wynne Delacoma (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) where more information about the composition can be found.
Notable Performances/Recordings:
Newport Symphony Orchestra (2024)
Elgin Symphony Orchestra (2024)
National Symphony Orchestra (2023)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2022)
Newport Symphony Orchestra (2024)
Elgin Symphony Orchestra (2024)
National Symphony Orchestra (2023)
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (2022)