Miller Theatre Concludes 25th Anniversary Of Composer Portraits With Jessie Montgomery

Miller Theatre at Columbia University School of the Arts will conclude its 25th anniversary
of Composer Portraits with Jessie Montgomery.

The Grammy-winning composer and her ensemble The Everything Band, joined by mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran and violinist Dana Kelley, premiere a Miller commission alongside other works.  Featuring an onstage discussion with Jessie Montgomery. Taking place Thursday, April 3, 7:30PM at Miller Theatre.

The music of composer Jessie Montgomery is performed regularly by leading orchestras and ensembles around the globe. Winner of the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Classical Composition and Musical America's 2023 Composer of the Year, the Juilliard-trained violinist is immersed in a diverse range of projects, including The Everything Band — eight composer-performers of varied stylistic backgrounds creating music by experimentation, improvisation, and open-ended form. Montgomery performs alongside the ensemble for this Portrait, featuring a newly commissioned work and the hauntingly beautiful Source Code for string quartet.

Program:

Everything, All at Once (2025), world premiere, Miller Theatre commission
Lunar Songs (2019) 
Loisaida, My Love (2016) 
Break Away (2013) 
Source Code (2013) for string quartet 

Artists:

Alicia Hall Moran, mezzo-soprano
Jessie Montgomery, violin
Dana Kelley, viola
The Everything Band

Jessie Montgomery is a Grammy-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness. Montgomery is 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 and ensembles around the world. In June 2024, she 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. 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.” 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, including The Everything Band—eight composer-performers of varied stylistic backgrounds creating music by experimentation, improvisation, and open-ended form.

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 supports 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 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. Montgomery holds degrees from The Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at Princeton University. She serves on the Composition and Music Technology faculty at Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music.

Mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran is a multi-dimensional artist whose work performing and composing spans opera, art, theater, film, and jazz. She made her Broadway debut in the Tony-winning revival Porgy and Bess, starring as Bess on the celebrated 20-city American tour. 

Moran has collaborated with renowned artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Adam Pendleton, Joan Jonas, Ragnar Kjartansson, Simone Leigh, Liz Magic Laser; curator Okwui Enwezor, and choreographer Bill T. Jones; musicians Bill Frisell, Charles Lloyd, and the band Harriet Tubman; diverse writers ranging from Simon Schama to Carl Hancock Rux. She has held artist residencies at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MassMoCA, and National Sawdust, and has been commissioned by ArtPublic/Miami Art Basel, the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Prototype Festival.

In partnership with husband and collaborator Jason Moran, she was awarded a 2017 Art of Change fellowship by the Ford Foundation, and has developed work for the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Walker Art Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Center in Chicago, and the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg), among others. Other projects include her debut album Heavy Blue (2015), the motown project, The Five Fans, Breaking Ice: The Battle of the Carmens, and Black Wall Street, a personal and historical reflection on the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. Her second album, Here Today, was released in 2017.

Moran has appeared at jazz venues such as the Village Vanguard, The Stone, Jazz@Lincoln Center, Highline Ballroom, San Francisco Jazz, and the Kennedy Center, among others. She has also performed with the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, Chicago Philharmonic, Austin Symphony, Roanoke Symphony, and the Dayton Philharmonic, as well as new contemporary orchestral works by composers including Gabriel Kahane and Bryce Dessner.

A member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestra of St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, Dana Kelley has performed as guest principal viola of the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra and as a member of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Praised for her rich and beautiful tone, she has been a top prizewinner in the Sphinx Music Competition, the Irving M. Klein International String Competition, the M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition, and Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition.