comments by phillip huscher | gerard mcburney

jessie montgomery

Born December 8, 1981; New York City

Hymn for Everyone

In June 2021, shortly after Jessie Montgomery was named the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s new Mead Composer-inResidence, the Orchestra played her music for the rst time: Strum, music for strings that is rooted in American folk tradition and governed by the spirit of dance. Her three-year appointment began July 1. Picked by Zell Music Director Riccardo Muti, she has been commissioned to write three new works for the Orchestra— one for each of her three seasons in the post. Hymn for Everyone was the rst; the second, Trans gure to Grace, receives its premiere in May. Like her immediate predecessors as resident composers in Chicago, Montgomery guides the Orchestra’s MusicNOW series, curating its programs of new works and writing music for the series as well. It was the MusicNOW series, under Missy Mazzoli’s direction at the time, which introduced her string quartet, Break Away, to Chicago audiences in 2019. Montgomery is a native of the Lower East Side of New York City. The arts were part of her daily family life. She remembers practicing violin in one room, while her father, Edward Montgomery, was busy composing in another, and her mother, Robbie McCauley—a performance artist, director, and writer—was rehearsing in yet another space.

Growing up as an artist in that world, Montgomery says she was always in a “state of wonder.” She was also accustomed to having many di erent cultures in her friend group. She started violin lessons at the Third Street Music School Settlement, and now hold degrees from the Juilliard School (in violin) composed

2021 instrumentation two flutes with piccolo, two oboes and english horn, two clarinets, two bassoons with contrabassoon, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (chimes, almglocken, tam-tam, bass drum), strings approximate performance time

12 minutes

Commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra through the Helen Zell Commissioning Program and New York University (a master’s in composition for lm and multimedia), and is completing her doctorate from Princeton University. Since 1999, she has been closely involved with Sphinx, a Detroit-based nonpro t organization that supports young Black and Latino string players. In recent years, she has made time to continue appearing with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble. She is still an active performer, and last summer she played in her own score for the premiere of Pam Tanowitz’s dance piece, I was waiting for the echo of a better day.

Montgomery has devoted her career to working with young artists and musicians with diverse backgrounds and ideas, and she is known for immersing herself in the activities of the new-music community, all of which she continues in Chicago. Montgomery is also keenly aware that she is working in the hometown of Florence Price— she calls her “the godmother of Black music”—whose music the Chicago Symphony introduced on a history-making evening in 1933, when then–Music Director Frederick Stock premiered her Symphony no. 1.

Montgomery’s plate is full and overowing; she is booked with commissions well into the future. As the New York Times reported in a pro le of Montgomery in September 2021, it is estimated that her orchestral scores were performed nearly 400 times in the previous year. In 2020, she was named to the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works commissioning program, one of three Black composers picked in what was widely seen as a welcome reboot of one of America’s most tradition-bound institutions. The online magazine Musical America named Montgomery 2023 Composer of the Year in October. The signi cance of her emergence in today’s cultural climate—especially heightened in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement— and the responsibilities it carries, are not lost on Montgomery: “We have to take into account that we’re carrying a history inside of our beings and in the work that we do,” she said recently.

One can learn a lot about Montgomery by considering her music—the reasons she composes, the sensibilities she advocates. In Banner, Montgomery’s signature tribute to the 200th anniversary of The Star-Spangled Banner from 2014, she addresses the question: “What does an anthem for the twenty- rst century sound like in today’s multicultural environment?” In Montgomery’s hands, it is an exploration of the divides that slice through American culture: “For most Americans the song represents a paradigm of liberty and solidarity against erce odds, and for others it implies a contradiction between the ideals of freedom and the realities of injustice and oppression.” Her whole catalog is animated by that kind of attention to the world around her. In a sense, it echoes what her mother, a pioneering artist whose work often dealt with issues of race, once said: “Find a way to house the contradictions rather than resolve them.”

Montgomery makes art that is rmly set in the present, which would not be notable today in theater or ction, for example, but stands out in the world of classical music, which has for so long lived largely in the European past. Coincident Dances, the score the Chicago Symphony Orchestra played in October 2021, is a kind of snapshot of musical life today: a fusion of di erent musics—English consort, samba, mbira dance music from Ghana, swing, techno—it captures what Montgomery describes as “the multicultural aural palette one hears even in a short walk through a New York City neighborhood.”

But Montgomery’s music suggests that she not only possesses the rare gift of writing music that re ects the complexity of our world, but one that will lead us forward. By already forging her own distinct voice in a crowded musical scene—a voice that melds and marries many di erent in uences—she is well positioned to help guide the music of our multifaceted future. “I’ve always been interested in trying to nd the intersection between di erent types of music,” she has said. “I imagine that music is a meeting place at which all people can converse about their unique di erences and common stories.”

Hymn for Everyone, the piece for the Chicago Symphony that Montgomery began during the pandemic, snapped into focus after the death of her mother last May. When Montgomery discovered that her mother had written a “Poem for Everyone,” the piece not only had a subtext as a musical tribute to her mother, but a title as well.

Jessie Montgomery on Hymn for Everyone

Hymn for Everyone is based on a hymn that I wrote during the spring of 2021 that was a re ection on personal and collective challenges happening at the time. Up until that point, I had resisted composing “response pieces” to the pandemic and sociopolitical upheaval, and had been experiencing an intense writer’s block. But one day, after a long hike, this hymn just came to me—a rare occurrence. The melody traverses through di erent orchestral “choirs,” and is accompanied by the rest of the ensemble. It is a kind of meditation for orchestra, exploring various washes of color and timbre through each repetition of the melody.

—Phillip Huscher

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Dmitri Shostakovich

Born September 25, 1906; Saint Petersburg, Russia

Died August 9, 1975; Moscow, Russia

Symphony No. 11, Op. 103 (The Year 1905)

One might have naively thought that when Stalin died in March 1953, Shostakovich would have found himself released from the crushing creative, personal, and political pressures of the dictator’s last years. To some extent, this was the case, although nobody in the Soviet Union at the time imagined Stalinism would come to an end just because Stalin himself wasn’t there. Certainly, Shostakovich’s immediate creative response to Stalin’s death was striking enough: the Tenth Symphony, a work of tremendous musical dynamism and vivid human scope. At the same time during these early post-Stalinist years, the composer was also adding substantially to his reputation by releasing a number of powerful and already written works, like the First Violin Concerto and the Fourth String Quartet, which he had previously held back for fear of the consequences. Taken together, these old and new pieces gave every reason to suppose that Shostakovich would now experience a liberation of his genius.

And yet, after the initial explosion of the Tenth, there actually followed one of his bleakest periods. Although a few important pieces date from this time, Shostakovich spent a great part of his energies composing tub-thumping lm music, music for unpretentious practical use, and “o cial” music of one kind or another, including popular songs to sentimental words of the “Communist Youth” variety. His admirers were confused and disappointed, and he himself complained of frustration and depression.

composed

1956–August 4, 1957 first performance

October 30, 1957, Moscow instrumentation three flutes and piccolo, three oboes and english horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, snare drum, bass drum, tam-tam, xylophone, bells, celesta, two harps, strings approximate performance time 62 minutes above: Dmitri Shostakovich, photo by Roger Rössing (1929–2006) and Renate Rössing (1929–2005), 1950. Deutsche Fotothek

One major cause of his inertia at this period was the death of his wife Nina Varzar in December 1954. A distinguished scientist and an immensely strong character, Nina had been the rock on which his life had been built for many years. Their marriage had not been easy and was “open.” But without her, Shostakovich seemed, as several friends later remembered, rudderless, lonely, and confused.

It was during this time that the composer began to acquire an unenviable reputation as an unadventurous conservative, a hack, an o cial Soviet bard. In the West, his music was written o by commentators as more or less irrelevant as the avant-garde discovered brave new worlds of sound and post-war popular music began to overwhelm the classical traditions. In his own country, the young and rebellious musical generation that came to maturity in those Khrushchev years looked harshly and askance at this dinosaur from another age (he was only fty). Half-forgotten were the wonders and experiments of his early years, and even the vast and tragic ironies of his middle-period symphonies seemed less important than they once had.

Then, in the summer of 1957, while staying in his favorite dacha (country cottage) in Komarovo on the north Baltic coast just west of Leningrad, Shostakovich produced his Eleventh Symphony.

The auguries were not good. At rst hearing, this symphony con rmed the worst fears of the composer’s detractors, and, at the same time, found worryingly warm favor with Soviet ocials, who declared it one of the composer’s most satisfactory and splendidly Soviet pieces. To most listeners—those who liked it and those who hated it—the Eleventh seemed the very embodiment of the doctrine of Socialist Realism.

What made it such a perfect example of that state-sponsored aesthetic? First, the fact that it was explicitly written for the fortieth-anniversary celebrations of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and that it purported to memorialize another sacred date in Soviet history: the 1905 Revolution. Then, there was the all too neat way it ful lled so many of the musical ideals of Socialist Realism: it was heavily pictorial and programmatic; it often sounded like lm music (a very good thing for Socialist Realists); most of the thematic material was not the composer’s own but drawn from nineteenth-century revolutionary songs that most people in the audience would already know and love (this was another very important quali cation for Socialist Realist music); and, nally, its harmonic and orchestral language was deeply and obviously indebted to nineteenth-century Russian nationalist music (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and the rest).

One particular listener at the time of the rst performance understood all of this in a completely di erent way. She was no special friend of Shostakovich’s and no musician, but she was one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets—Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). Zoya Tomashevskaya, the daughter of a famous literary critic, remembered the occasion well:

At the premiere of the Eleventh Symphony, there was a lot of discontented muttering. The music-loving connoisseurs alleged that the symphony was devoid of interest. All around one heard such remarks as: “He has sold himself down the river. Nothing but quotations and revolutionary songs.”

Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova kept her silence. For some reason, my father couldn’t attend the concert. When we came home afterwards, he asked us, “Well, how was it?” And Anna Andreyevna answered, “Those songs were like white birds ying against a terrible black sky.”

Akhmatova had evidently been deeply moved. To another friend she commented:

His revolutionary songs sometimes spring up close by, sometimes oat by far away in the sky . . . they are up like lightning . . . That’s the way it was in 1905. I remember.

Akhmatova had put her nger on one of the three keys to this symphony— the extraordinary and vivid choice of nineteenth-century songs that provide most of the melodies. The other two keys are the way the symphony develops ideas from one of Shostakovich’s own compositions, the sixth of his Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets, op. 88, a work for unaccompanied chorus written in 1951. And, nally, there is the way almost the entire symphony seems clearly modeled on a crucial work of music from Russia’s past, one of Shostakovich’s personal favorites— Mussorgsky’s mighty historical opera about a revolution, Boris Godunov. Echoes of the crowd scenes from Boris—from coronation to revolution— abound in all four movements and there are also speci c references to details of Mussorgsky’s piece, including the famous two chords of the Coronation Bells. All three of these keys to the mystery bring us to the intriguing realization that this is one of the most purely “Russian” of all Shostakovich’s symphonies. There is hardly a hint of Mahler, who was so important as a model from the First Symphony to the Tenth.

The nineteenth-century revolutionary songs that so excited Akhmatova are little known to American listeners. But to Russians of the early twentieth century, these lyrics and tunes were part of their cultural inheritance, rather like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the United States.

The rst movement opens with Mussorgskian scene-setting music, establishing the place—Palace Square in the middle of Saint Petersburg—and the time—the hour before dawn on the fateful day of January 9, 1905, at the moment when the Russian Revolution of that year began. We hear the frozen stillness of the river Neva in the darkness, the distant sounds of military bugles calling “Reveille” in the barracks, and the equally distant chanting of the

Russian Orthodox prayer for the dead, the Kontakion.

Then, like an echo from one of the prison cells in the Peter-Paul Fortress immediately opposite the Winter Palace, we catch the rst of those songs Akhmatova recognized—“Listen!” This was a popular ballad with nineteenth-century political prisoners and it often was sung in Stalin’s Gulags, too. It tells a convict’s story of hearing a fellow prisoner being led out to early-morning execution. Shostakovich introduces it on the gentle sound of two utes (like two trumpets playing in the distance), just after an eerie passage of softly beating drums:

Like the deed of a traitor, like the conscience of a tyrant, The autumn night is black. But blacker than night looms out of the mist

A gloomy vision of the prison. All around, the lazy stepping of the guards

In the quiet of the night. But—there it is!—

Like the tolling of a bell, lingeringly, longingly, the echoing call: “Listen!”

A little further on in the rst movement, after a reprise of “Listen!” in the bassoon, violins, and violas, Shostakovich introduces a second melody, gloomy and hymnlike, rst in the cellos and basses, then in the ute and clarinet. This is “The Arrested Man,” a song from 1850:

The night is dark. Seize the moment!

But the walls of the prison are strong,

And the gates are locked

With two iron padlocks.

Along the corridor there faintly ickers

The watchman’s candle, And the jingling of the spurs

Of the sentry, who longs to live.

There follows a grief- lled exchange of words between two equally oppressed individuals, a despairing prisoner and the sentry who cannot help him.

The second movement mostly plays not with tunes from early songs, but instead with melodies taken from the second key ingredient of the Eleventh Symphony, Shostakovich’s own unaccompanied choral setting of Arkady Kotz’s poem written in the aftermath of the catastrophe it describes, the Bloody Sunday massacre that took place in front of the Winter Palace on January 9, 1905:

Bare your heads! Bare your heads!

On this bitter day the shadow of a long night trembled over the earth.

In musical language vividly reminiscent of the choral scenes from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, the unarmed protestors, carrying portraits of Tsar Nicholas II, process to his palace to ask for his help:

Hey you, father Tsar! Look around you.

We have nothing to live on, your servants give us no help.

After a climax in which the orchestra repeats over and over again the phrase “Bare your heads,” Shostakovich returns for a moment to the opening of the symphony, to the prayer for the dead and, again, the sound of the old song “Listen!”

The third movement—Eternal Memory (the Russian name for the ancient chant we call the Kontakion, which we already heard at the beginning of the symphony)—is a funeral march or processional. It starts with the revolutionary funeral song “You fell as a victim”:

You fell as a victim in the fateful struggle

Of sel ess love for the people. You gave everything that you could for them,

For their lives, their honor and their freedom.

Sometimes you were tormented in dank prisons . . .

Your merciless sentence

Had already been decided for you by the executioner-judges

And your chains rattled as you walked.

This lovely old tune is soon answered by a stern, revolutionary marching song. Here, Shostakovich combines several di erent sources into a single musical utterance. The most prominent melodies here come from two songs. The rst begins:

Bravely, comrades, step forward! Your spirit has been strengthened in the struggle.

Let us lean our bodies forwards On the road to the kingdom of freedom.

We all come from the people, We are the children of working families.

Brotherly union and freedom— This is the slogan that takes us into battle.

The second song at this point is called “Hail, free word of liberty!”

The nale of the Eleventh begins with a ery revolutionary march:

Rage, you tyrants, and mock at us, Threaten us with prison and with chains.

We are stronger than you in spirit, Though you trampled on our bodies.

Shame! Shame! Shame on you, you tyrants!

This is followed, in an extended marching sequence for the strings of the orchestra alone, by one of the most famous and catchy of all revolutionary anthems, the so-called Warsaw Song:

Malevolent whirlwinds blow around us,

Dark forces press down on us with hate.

We have engaged in the fateful struggle with our enemies, The fate that awaits us is still unknown.

But with pride and courage we will raise

The battle standard of the workers’ cause, The standard of the great struggle of all peoples For a better world, for holy freedom! To the bloody battle, Holy and true, March, march onwards, You working people!

The violence unleashed in this nal movement is astonishing, overpowering with its sense of uncontrollable rage. The symphony ends with a last return to Shostakovich’s own 1951 chorus and its opening words, repeated over and over again and at deafening volume by the whole orchestra: “Bare your heads! Bare your heads!”

And that brings us back to the meaning of this symphony and to Akhmatova’s brilliant description of the songs in it as like “white birds ying against a terrible black sky.” This piece may indeed be “about” the 1905 Revolution, that bloody upheaval whose eventual failure led directly to the 1917 Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union. Then again, when Shostakovich wrote it, his country was only just emerging from the nightmare of the Stalinist Terror and the mass executions and imprisonments by means of which the Bolsheviks continued the old tyranny of the Romanov emperors in new and vastly destructive forms. And in the year in which it was composed, the USSR invaded Hungary and bloodily repressed the uprising there, an event which caused many Western communists to tear up their party cards and made many more in the Soviet intelligentsia, to which Shostakovich belonged, despair at the workings of their own country.

Shostakovich himself never “explained” this music, beyond leaving its pictorial titles to tell a clear story of 1905 almost in the manner of a children’s cartoon book. But when we hear and listen—“Listen!”—to its not so hidden words (and almost every bar suggests words), then we quickly see that what the composer is talking about has many more layers of meaning than we rst suspected. This is a symphony not about one event, but many events, and about how any one of us approaches those events in the darkness of our conscience.

—Gerard McBurney

Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Gerard McBurney is a British composer and writer, working in theater, radio, television, and the concert hall. He has a long-standing interest in the music of Shostakovich and has reconstructed, reinvented, and reorchestrated a number of lost works by this composer, including his orchestration of the Prologue to Shostakovich’s lost opera, Orango, which was premiered in 2011 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen and subsequently recorded by Deutsche Grammophon. Between 2006 and 2016, he was Artistic Programming Advisor at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and Creative Director of Beyond the Score®.

Lidiya Yankovskaya Conductor

Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya is a ercely committed advocate for Slavic masterpieces, operatic rarities, and contemporary works on the leading edge of classical music. Since her appointment as Elizabeth Morse and Genius Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater in 2017, Yankovskaya has led the Chicago premieres of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, Rachmaninov’s Aleko, Joby Talbot’s Everest, Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, and Mark Adamo’s Becoming Santa Claus, as well as the world premiere of Dan Shore’s Freedom Ride. Her daring performances before and amid the pandemic earned recognition from the Chicago Tribune, which named her 2020 Chicagoan of the Year.

In the 2022–23 season, Yankovskaya makes debuts with the Los Angeles

Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Sacramento Philharmonic, Knoxville Symphony, and Richmond Symphony. She also debuts at Santa Fe Opera in a new production of Dvořák’s Rusalka, at Staatsoper Hamburg with Eugene Onegin, and at English National Opera in a newly staged production of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. She leads the long-awaited world premieres of Edward Tulane at Minnesota Opera and The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing at Chicago Opera Theater.

Yankovskaya is an alumna of the Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute for Women Conductors and the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, and a proud two-time recipient of Solti Foundation U.S. Career Assistance Awards. Yankovskaya is also the founder and artistic director of the Refugee Orchestra Project.

Civic Orchestra of Chicago

Founded in 1919 by Frederick Stock, second music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), the Civic Orchestra of Chicago prepares emerging professional musicians for lives in music. Civic members participate in rigorous orchestral training, September through June each season, with the Robert Kohl and Clark Pellett Principal Conductor Ken-David Masur, musicians of the CSO, and some of today’s most luminary conductors including the CSO’s Zell Music Director Riccardo Muti.

The importance of the Civic Orchestra’s role in Greater Chicago is underscored by its commitment to present concerts of the highest quality at no charge to the public. In addition to the critically acclaimed live concerts at Symphony Center, Civic Orchestra performances can be heard locally on WFMT (98.7 FM).

Civic musicians also expand their creative, professional, and artistic boundaries and reach diverse audiences through educational performances at Chicago Public Schools and a series of chamber concerts at various locations throughout the city, including Chicago Park District eld houses and the National Museum of Mexican Art.

To further expand its musician training, the Civic Orchestra launched the Civic Fellowship program in the

2013–14 season. Each year ten to fteen Civic members are designated as Civic Fellows and participate in intensive leadership training that is designed to build and diversify their creative and professional skills.

From 2010 to 2019, Yo-Yo Ma was a leading mentor to Civic musicians and sta in his role as CSO Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant, and the programs and initiatives he established are integral to the Civic Orchestra curriculum today. Civic Orchestra musicians develop as exceptional orchestral players and engaged artists, cultivating their ability to succeed in the rapidly evolving world of music in the twenty- rst century.

The Civic Orchestra’s long history of presenting full orchestra performances free to the public includes annual concerts at the South Shore Cultural Center (in partnership with the South Shore Advisory Council) as well as numerous Chicago Public Schools. The Civic Orchestra is a signature program of the Negaunee Music Institute at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which o ers a wide range of education and community programs that engage more than 200,000 people of diverse ages, incomes, and backgrounds each year, in Chicago and around the world.

For more on the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and its Principal Conductor Ken-David Masur, please visit cso.org/civic.

Civic Orchestra of Chicago

Ken-David Masur Principal Conductor

The Robert Kohl and Clark Pellett Principal Conductor Chair violins

Jesus Linarez

Matthew Weinberg

Subin Shin

Marian Antonette Mayuga*

Dylan Marshall Feldpausch*

Sungjoo Kang

Annie Pham

Diego Diaz+

Shin Lan

Crystal Qi

Luke Lentini+

Hee Woo Seo

Hee Yeon Kim*

Edward Sanford

Robbie Herbst

Olga Kossovich

Kristian Brusubardis

Janani Sivakumar

Ran Huo

Kina Ono

Kimberly Bill

Valentina Guillen Menesello

Nelson Mendoza Hernandez*

Liya Ma

Hsuan Chen

Grace Walker

Emily Nardo

Laura Schafer

Owen Ruff+

Carlos Chacon violas

Amanda Kellman

Pedro Mendez

Aditi Prakash

Derrick Ware

Megan Yeung

August DuBeau

Carlos Lozano Sanchez

Santiago Del Castillo Aréchiga

Teddy Schenkman*

Ching Ting Chan

Larissa Mapua

Michael Ayala cellos

Miles Link

Cameron Slaugh

Jaime An

Annamarie Wellems

Charlotte Ullman

Lidanys Graterol

Abby Monroe

Francisco Malespin*

Hana Takemoto

Eva María Barbado Gutiérrez+ basses

Jake Platt

Olivia Reyes

Ben Foerster

Caleb Edwards

Victor Stahoviak

Nate Beaver

Hannah Novak

Bennett Norris flutes

Aalia Hanif

Katarina Ignatovich

Eric Leise oboes

Andrew Port*

James Jihyun Kim

Kyung Yeon Hong clarinets

Irina Chang

Antonio Garrasi

Laurie Blanchet+ bassoons

Liam Jackson

Seo Young (Michelle) Min

Edin Agamenoni+ horns

Jacob Medina

Michael Stevens

Nelson Yovera Perez

Ryan Williamson

Sylvia Denecke trumpets

Michael Leavens

Ismael Cañizares Ortega

Joshua Harris trombones

Felix Regalado

Hugo Saavedra Arciniegas* bass trombone

Alexander Mullins tuba

Nick Collins timpani

David Miller percussion

Thaddeus Chung

Charley Gillette

Jordan Berini

Dylan Brule

George Tantchev harp

Natalie Man

Ksenia Sushkevich celesta

Wenlin Cheng librarian

Anna Thompson

* Civic Orchestra Fellow + Civic Orchestra Alumni