Grammy-winning composer-violinist Jessie Montgomery characterizes herself as a “hunter-gatherer”: her music combines elements of the European concert-hall tradition with African American and other vernacular influences, including folk idioms, spirituals, and blues, that have expanded and enriched the vocabulary of contemporary American classical music. A member of the multicultural Silk Road Ensemble, she sees music as “a meeting place at which all people can converse about their unique differences and common stories.” Montgomery has long been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization, a pioneer in the movement to promote diversity in the arts by advocating for Black and Latino classical musicians. Her ongoing musical exploration of the African American experience is reflected in such works as Five Slave Songs, a nonet inspired by the Great Migration, and a “re-envisioning” of Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha, scored for an ensemble of African and Western instruments.

Montgomery’s compositions range from somber meditations to joyful, Ivesian jamborees. Strum, a short piece bursting with folksy lyricism and kinetic energy, falls into the latter category. Written in 2006 and revised six years later for the 15th annual Sphinx Competition, it was originally conceived for an ensemble of two violins, viola, and two cellos. Montgomery explains that “the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinato that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.”

© Harry Haskell, 2024

Pura Fé Crescioni, whose name means “Pure Faith,” was born in New York City. She was raised by her mother, a classically trained opera singer who ensured that her daughter received professional-caliber instruction in both music and dance. While training at the American Ballet Theatre, Pura Fé got an early start in show business by doing studio work, singing television commercials and jingles, and performing in Broadway musicals and road shows. Pura Fé’s career took off in 1995, when the writer and musician James McBride produced her first solo album for a major record label. Two years later she moved to North Carolina to reconnect with her maternal heritage in the historic homeland of the Tuscarora Nation. (She now lives in northern Saskatchewan, Canada.) Her Indigenous, African American, Scotch-Irish, Corsican, and Caribbean heritage is mirrored in the diversity of her musical influences, which range from traditional Native American idioms to blues, jazz, and various strains of roots music.

Rattle Songs was featured on the1996 debut album of Ulali, the Indigenous women’s a cappella vocal trio that Pura Fé founded in 1987. The bewitching spell cast by the songs’ gently pulsating rhythms, incantatory melodies, and close harmonies is enhanced, in the original version, by rattles—folk instruments associated with Indigenous rituals and ceremonies. Yet although Rattle Songs pays homage to Pura Fé’s ancestral culture, the impulse behind the music feels primal and universal. “When you have many lineages, all that stuff is alive, it’s in you, it’s in your veins, you know?” she says. “The way your hair curls, it’s in your thought, it’s what you’re made of, your memory. So, all of that, it’s old, it goes back to the beginning of everything. So, whatever codes are in you usually come out.”

© Harry Haskell, 2024

Like Pura Fé, Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate synthesizes European and Indigenous elements in music that transcends cultural and stylistic boundaries. A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, he was born in Norman, OK, and studied piano at Northwestern University and composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Tate identifies as “a Chickasaw classical composer,” adding that “everything that I compose is based on American Indian history and culture.” Yet at first, he “saw absolutely no relationship between my tribal identity and my classical career.” When his mother—a professional choreographer of Manx Irish descent—asked him to write the score for a ballet based on Native American stories, he realized that “all [the music] I was playing was repertoire by composers who were doing the exact same thing. I grew up on Tchaikovsky—you couldn’t be more Russian than Tchaikovsky. Here’s Stravinsky doing Russian folk tales, and of course there’s Bartók, who again consciously became an ethnomusicologist of his own people.” Tate translated that realization into a highly successful career: among the many ensembles and institutions for which he has composed commissioned works are the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Turtle Island Quartet, and the Dale Warland Singers.

Woodland Songs, written for the Dover Quartet, is a kind of sequel to Tate’s 2013 string quartet Pisachi,a set of six “epitomes” designed to accompany a touring exhibition of images of southwestern Native American communities and landscapes. The imagery of his new work, however, is rooted in a different soil and culture. “Chickasaw families are divided into matriarchal lineal clans, much like many cultures around the world,” the composer says. “Our clans are named after animals and my family is from the Raccoon Clan, or Shawi' Iksa'. We are also originally from the eastern woodlands of America and our songs and legends reflect many woodland animals. For this string quartet composition, I enjoyed creating a five-character suite about our woodland animal cousins, whom I adore. My compositions typically express Native culture through a highly dramatic and theatric lens, and this work is meant to amply the wonderful personalities of each animal. There are many occurrences and abstractions of our woodland animal songs throughout this suite and the work is dedicated to my son, Heloha (Thunder) Tate.”

This work was commissioned by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Cal Performances, Carnegie Hall, Chamber Music Houston, Chamber Music Northwest, Chamber Music Pittsburgh, Chamber Music Society of Fort Worth, Curtis Institute of Music, Friends of Chamber Music (Denver), Kingston Chamber Music Festival, Northwestern University, and Shriver Hall Concert Series.

© Harry Haskell, 2024

Dvořák was in his early 30s when he first made his mark in his native Bohemia. Until then, the composer’s reputation had hardly penetrated beyond the city limits of Prague, where he earned a modest living as a piano teacher and church organist. A few of his songs and chamber works had been performed locally, and his Slavic-flavored comic opera King and Charcoal Burner had been well received at the city’s Czech opera house. (There was also one for German opera.) But Dvořák’s career finally took off when the imperial Austrian government awarded him a prestigious stipend in 1875.In addition to providing a measure of financial security, the prize brought him to the attention of Johannes Brahms, a member of the award jury.

Brahms’s endorsement was transformative: with his works issued under the imprint of a prestigious German publisher, Dvořák became an international celebrity virtually overnight. Invitations to perform and commissions for new works began streaming in from all over Europe. Dvořák’s early popularity, both at home and abroad, rested largely on works steeped in Czech folk music and lore, such as the Slavonic Dances, Moravian Duets, and Gypsy Melodies. But Brahms and other friends urged him to adopt a more cosmopolitan (that is, Germanic) stance to get his music performed in Vienna, the cultural capital of eastern Europe.

A proud nationalist, Dvořák ultimately remained true to his Slavic roots, but not without undergoing a period of intense soul searching. As he gradually reasserted his identity as a Czech composer, melody came to play an ever more prominent role in his music. He found a fertile source of melody close to home in the dumka, a traditional folk lament popular throughout the Slavic world and adopted by many Romantic composers, including Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky, and Leoš Janáček. Dvořák had already incorporated dumky (the of plural dumka) in such works as the Op. 48 String Sextet of 1878 and would do so again in the Dumky Piano Trio of 1890-91, which is almost nothing but dumky—and variations on dumky—from start to finish.

A dumka is the centerpiece of Dvořák’s A-major Piano Quintet, a work that is by turns brilliantly exuberant and poignantly melancholy. Composed in 1887, the Quintet has long been one of his most beloved works. In the opening Allegro, the cello spins out a languorous melody that pivots adroitly from major to minor, provoking a vivacious riposte from the other three players. The second theme is introduced by the viola, Dvořák’s own instrument, and has a more restless and urgent character. The violist does the honors again in the warmly lyrical slow movement. The dumka’s measured Slavic strains give way to a fast and furious Scherzo (the subtitle “Furiant” refers to a Bohemian folk dance), whose boisterous energy is tempered by a flowing countermelody and a tranquil middle section. The finale is built around a rollicking, high-spirited tune that gets bandied from one instrument to another.

© Harry Haskell, 2024