Strum for String Quartet
COMPOSED 2006
Violinist, composer, and music educator
Jessie Montgomery, who served as Mead Composer-inResidence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2021 to 2024, started studying violin at age four at the Third Street Music School Settlement in her native New York City. She was composing by age eleven, and while still in high school, she twice received the Composer’s Apprentice Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Montgomery went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in violin performance at Juilliard and a master’s from New York University in film scoring and multimedia; she also studied composition with Derek Bermel and Steven Burke and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. In 2020 she was appointed to the faculty of the Mannes School of Music in New York. As a composer, Montgomery has created works for concert, theater, and film (one of which was in collaboration with her father, Ed
Montgomery, also a composer and an independent film producer) and held residencies with the Deer Valley Music Festival, New York Youth Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, and Sphinx Virtuosi. Among her rapidly accumulating distinctions are the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and recognition as Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. In September 2021, Montgomery was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera along with two other Black composers—Valerie Coleman and Joel Thompson—to develop new works in collaboration with the Lincoln Center Theater.
Jessie Montgomery on Strum
Strum is the culmination of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally composed for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and
this page: Jessie Montgomery, photo by Todd Rosenberg | opposite page: Florence Price, portrait by R.D. Tones, 1933. Florence Beatrice Smith Price Papers Addendum, MC 988a, Box 2, Folder 1, Item 3. Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville
the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the Fifteenth Annual Sphinx Competition. Originally conceived for a quintet of two violins, viola, and two cellos, the voicing is often spread over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive sound. Within Strum, I utilized “texture motifs,” layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinatos [repeating figures] to form a bed of
FLORENCE B. PRICE
Born April 9, 1888; Little Rock, Arkansas Died June 3, 1953; Chicago, Illinois
sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a “texture motif” and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, Strum has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.
String Quartet No. 2 in A Minor
Florence B. Price was a musical pioneer— one of the first Black students to graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music, the first Black woman to have a symphonic work performed by a major American orchestra, the first winner of the composition contest sponsored by the progressive Wanamaker Foundation.
Florence Beatrice Smith was born in 1888 into the prosperous and cultured family of a dentist in Little Rock, Arkansas, and received her first piano lessons from her mother, a schoolteacher and singer; Florence first played in public when she was four.
She later also took up organ and violin and, at age fourteen, was admitted to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. There, Florence studied with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, two of their generation’s leading composers, wrote her first string trio and a symphony (now lost), and graduated in 1907 with honors for both an artist diploma in organ and a teaching certificate. She returned to Arkansas, where she taught at Arkadelphia Academy and Shorter College before being appointed music department chairman at Clark University in Atlanta in 1910. She returned to Little Rock two years later to marry attorney Thomas J. Price and left classroom teaching to devote herself to raising two daughters, giving
private instruction in violin, organ and piano, and composing.
In 1927, following racial unrest in Arkansas, the Price family moved to Chicago, where Florence studied composition, orchestration, organ, languages, and liberal arts at various schools with several of the city’s leading musicians and teachers. Black culture and music flourished in Chicago during those years—jazz, blues, spirituals, popular, theater, even classical— educational opportunities were readily available, recording studios were established, the National Association of Negro Musicians was founded there in 1919, and Price took advantage of everything. She ran a successful piano studio, wrote educational pieces for her students, published gospel and folksong arrangements, composed popular songs (under the pseudonym VeeJay), and performed as a church and theater organist. Among her many friends were the physician Dr. Monroe Alpheus Majors and his wife, organist and music teacher Estelle C. Bonds, and Price became both friend and teacher to their gifted daughter, Margaret. In 1932, Price and Bonds (then just nineteen) won respectively first and second prize in the Rodman Wanamaker Foundation Composition Competition, established to recognize classical compositions by Black composers, Price for her Symphony in E minor and Piano Sonata and Bonds for her song “Sea Ghost.”
The performance of Price’s symphony on June 15, 1933, by the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Stock, was the first by a major American orchestra of a symphonic work by a Black woman. Price continued to compose prolifically—three more symphonies and two more piano concertos, a violin concerto, chamber, piano and organ pieces, songs, spiritual arrangements, jingles for radio commercials—and received numerous performances, including her arrangement of the spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” that Marian Anderson used to close her historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington (D.C.) on April 9, 1939. Florence Price died in Chicago on June 3, 1953.
Price composed her String Quartet in A minor in 1935; the provenance of the piece is unknown, as are any early performances. The manuscript ended up among the many scores, letters, diaries, and photographs discovered in 2009 during renovations of an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, seventy miles south of Chicago, which had been Price’s weekend home and work studio. That nearly lost discovery is now preserved in the Florence Beatrice Smith Price Collection at the University of Arkansas. The Quartet no. 2 was published in 2019 and given its apparent premiere on October 27, 2019, as part of Castle of Our Skins, a concert and educational series at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston dedicated to celebrating Black artistry
opposite page: Wynton Marsalis, photo by Piper Ferguson
through music; the work’s first recording, by the Catalyst Quartet on Azica Records, was issued in February 2022.
The A minor quartet opens with a spacious sonata-form movement in which Price’s gifts for large-scale structures, crisp contrapuntal textures, harmonic sophistication, and themes rooted in African American traditions are all evident. A short, repeating motif given at the outset provides the continuing background for the movement’s brooding first theme; the lyrical subsidiary theme evokes both the blues and gospel songs of Price’s ancestral heritage. The extended center section skillfully weaves together all the motifs from the
WYNTON MARSALIS
exposition before a compact recapitulation and a dynamic coda bring the movement to a close. The hymn-like Andante is rooted in the emotions and style of the old plantation gospel songs. The Juba is based on an antebellum folk dance that involves foot-tapping, hand-clapping, and thigh-slapping, all in precise rhythm. (Such “body sounds” were unavoidable since slaves were forbidden by their owners from having drums for fear they might be used to send coded signals.) The finale is a spirited rondo based around a recurring refrain with intervening episodes, one of which includes cadenza-like passages for solo viola, cello, and violin.
Born October 18, 1961; New Orleans, Louisiana
At the Octoroon Balls
Wynton Marsalis, the second of six sons born to Ellis Marsalis, one of New Orleans’s foremost jazz pianists, received his first trumpet when he was six as a gift from Al Hirt. Marsalis did not begin formal trumpet study until he was twelve, but then he was trained in both classical and jazz styles, and within two years, he had performed Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the
New Orleans Philharmonic. In 1978 he studied at Tanglewood, receiving the Shapiro Award for Outstanding Brass Player; he was seventeen. A scholarship to Juilliard followed. Marsalis gathered a wide range of performing experiences in New York, playing in salsa and top-forty bands, Broadway shows, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. By 1980 he was touring with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and performing in a quartet with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. He made his first recording as a featured performer in 1981 and two years later became the
COMMENTS
first musician to win Grammy awards in the same year for recordings of both jazz (Think of One) and classical music (trumpet concertos by Haydn, Hummel, and Leopold Mozart). He has since won five more Grammy awards, Grand Prix du Disque, an Edison Award, and the Louis Armstrong Memorial Medal.
In 1987 Marsalis cofounded Jazz at Lincoln Center, which moved into its own home in 2004 at the Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle, the world’s first concert hall built specifically for jazz. Marsalis continues as artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and conductor of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which he leads in performances on tours around the world. Marsalis has also traveled widely as a teacher and spokesperson for jazz, given master classes, concerts, and lectures, written six books on the history and appreciation of jazz, delivered a series of six lectures titled “Hidden in Plain View: Meanings in American Music” at Harvard, and served as A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 2015 to 2021.
Marsalis is also highly regarded as a composer for small and large jazz ensembles, ballet, film, and concert— Blood on the Fields, his epic “jazz oratorio” based on the theme of slavery and celebrating the importance of freedom in America, won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Music, the first jazz composition to be so honored. His many other distinctions include the National Medal of Arts, honorary degrees from Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton, and more than thirty-five other leading
academic institutions, appointment in 2001 as a United Nations Messenger of Peace, Frederick Douglass Medallion for Distinguished Leadership from the New York Urban League, the rank of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French ministry of culture, and the National Humanities Medal, presented to him in 2015 by President Barack Obama.
At the Octoroon Balls, composed for string quartet in 1995, was inspired by Marsalis’s early life in New Orleans, where an international, multiethnic feast of music provided the fertile spawning ground for jazz a century ago. (An octoroon is a person with one-eighth Afro-American ancestry.) “A ball is a ritual and a dance,” the composer explained. “At the Octoroon Balls, there was an interesting cross-section of life. People from different strata of society came together in pursuit of pleasure and fulfillment. The music brought people together.” The work’s seven movements evoke both the wide variety of participants and the styles of music at the Mardi Grass celebrations: Come Long Fiddler, Mating Calls and Delta Rhythms, Creole Contradanzas, Many Gone, Hellbound Highball, Blue Lights on the Bayou, and Rampart Street Row House Rag.
Richard E. Rodda, a former faculty member at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music, provides program notes for many American orchestras, concert series, and festivals.
PROFILES
Matous Michal Violin
Matous Michal was appointed to the violin section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by Maestro Riccardo Muti in 2016. Prior to joining the CSO, he held a position in the first violin section of the Grant Park Orchestra.
A native of the Czech Republic, Matous Michal began his violin studies at age four under his father, Ladislav Michal. At fourteen, he began studies at the Prague Conservatory as a student of Jaroslav Foltýn. During that time, Michal came to the United States to participate in a summer program at the Meadowmount School of Music in upstate New York under Charles Avsharian. After graduating from the Prague Conservatory, he joined the studio of Glenn Dicterow and completed his bachelor’s degree at the Juilliard School. In May 2016, he earned his master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music in the orchestral performance program under Dicterow and Lisa Kim, four months after joining the CSO.
Matous Michal joined the CSO alongside his brother, fellow violinist Simon Michal.
Danny Yehun Jin Violin
Originally from South Korea, violinist Danny Yehun Jin made his debut as a soloist with the Seoul Royal Symphony at age nine. Jin, who was co-concertmaster of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra and concertmaster of the Music Academy of the West Orchestra in 2023, has also recently appeared as a soloist with the Seoul Philharmonic, Suwon Philharmonic, and Charleston Symphony Orchestra.
Jin is an award-winning violinist, receiving fifth prize at the Menuhin Competition in Beijing in 2012 and winning the Charleston Symphony Orchestra’s second Young Artist Competition in 2016. After studying at the Korean National University of Arts and the Korean National School for the Gifted in Arts as a young violinist, in 2023, Jin received his bachelor’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music as a Sandra G. and David G. Marshall Fellow. At Curtis, he was a student of Ida Kavafian and Erin Keefe.
Danny Lai Viola
Violist Danny Lai was appointed to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2014 by Maestro Riccardo Muti. He began his musical studies on the
piano at age six and started the viola in the Iowa City public school system when he was ten. At age sixteen, after performing the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony no. 2, he decided to pursue his dream of becoming a professional violist. He studied at Northwestern University with Roland Vamos while taking orchestral repertoire classes with former CSO principal violist Charles Pikler. After graduating with degrees in both economics and music, Lai joined the viola section of the Colorado Symphony.
In Chicago, Lai is a frequent chamber music collaborator, playing with groups such as Civitas, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, Chicago Pro Musica, and his colleagues in the CSO.
Lai is an alumnus of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra in Sydney, Australia. He is also a prize winner in major competitions, including the Stulberg Competition, Jefferson Symphony International Young Artists Competition, Thaviu String Competition, and Luminarts Union League Strings Competition.
Danny Lai plays on a contemporary viola made by Franz Kinberg.
Karen Basrak Cello
Karen Basrak joined the cello section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2012. A native of Arlington Heights, Illinois, Basrak began
her studies with Adele O’Dwyer, Gilda Barston, and Richard Hirschl. She received a bachelor of music degree in cello performance from the University of Southern California. While at USC, Basrak received several honors, most notably the Gregor Piatigorsky Award. Basrak was a member of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, beginning in 2001 as associate principal cello; she served as acting principal from 2002 to 2005 and principal from 2005 to 2012. Basrak has performed extensively throughout the United States and Europe and has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Northwest, Harper, Kishwaukee, Elmhurst, Skokie Valley, and Greenville symphony orchestras, Winnetka Chamber Orchestra, Marina del Rey–Westchester Symphony, and American Youth Symphony. As an advocate of music education, she has performed in schools nationwide. In recognition of her efforts, she was awarded the key to the city of Greenville, South Carolina. Basrak is on the faculty of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.
BEVERLY ARTS CENTER
Board of Directors
Katrina Pavlik, Stacey Recht, Scott Smith, Jahmal Cole, Crystal Warren, Shanya Gray, Dr. Sherelene A. Harris, Jim Noonan, Amy Stickel-Dattner, Mirjam Quinn, Jarrett King, Melanie Stathis, Alexis Kowalsky
Administration
Dr. Carla Carter, Executive Director
Lucy Brewster, Associate Managing Director
Matt McKinney, Associate Director of Artistic Programming
Kara Ryan, Assistant Director of Artistic Programming
Noel Price, Executive Administrator
Andre Jamal Cardine, Jr., Speaker
Production Team
Craig Loftis, Technical Director
Ade Luster, Sound Engineer
PHOTO BY TODD ROSENBERG
