Hour 6 – 3:00pm to 4:00pm
See featured performers below!
JESSIE MONTGOMERY
Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, language, and social justice, placing her squarely as one of the most relevant interpreters of 21st-century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).
Jessie was born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s during a time when the neighborhood was at a major turning point in its history. Artists gravitated to the hotbed of artistic experimentation and community development. Her parents – her father a musician, her mother a theater artist and storyteller – were engaged in the activities of the neighborhood and regularly brought Jessie to rallies, performances, and parties where neighbors, activists, and artists gathered to celebrate and support the movements of the time. It is from this unique experience that Jessie has created a life that merges composing, performance, education, and advocacy.
Since 1999, Jessie has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African-American and Latinx string players. She currently serves as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the Organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble. She was a two-time laureate of the annual Sphinx Competition and was awarded a generous MPower grant to assist in the development of her debut album, Strum: Music for Strings (Azica Records). She has received additional grants and awards from the ASCAP Foundation, Chamber Music America, American Composers Orchestra, the Joyce Foundation, and the Sorel Organization.
Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Five Slave Songs (2018) commissioned for soprano Julia Bullock by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Records from a Vanishing City (2016) for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Caught by the Wind (2016) for the Albany Symphony and the American Music Festival, and Banner (2014) – written to mark the
200th anniversary of The Star-Spangled Banner – for The Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation.
In the 2019-20 season, new commissioned works will be premiered by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the National Choral Society, and ASCAP Foundation. Jessie is also teaming up with composer-violinist Jannina Norpoth to reimagine Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha; it is being produced by Volcano Theatre and co-commissioned by Washington Performing Arts, Stanford University, Southbank Centre (London), National Arts Centre (Ottawa), and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Additionally, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony will all perform Montgomery’s works this season.
The New York Philharmonic has selected Jessie as one of the featured composers for their Project 19, which marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting equal voting rights in the United States to women. Other forthcoming works include a nonet inspired by the Great Migration, told from the perspective of Montgomery’s great-grandfather William McCauley and to be performed by Imani Winds and the Catalyst Quartet; a cello concerto for Thomas Mesa jointly commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, and The Sphinx Organization; and a new orchestral work for the National Symphony.
Jessie began her violin studies, at the Third Street Music School Settlement, one of the oldest community organizations in the country. A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and currently a member of the Catalyst Quartet, she continues to maintain an active performance career as a violinist appearing regularly with her own ensembles, as well as with the Silkroad Ensemble and Sphinx Virtuosi.
Jessie’s teachers and mentors include Sally Thomas, Ann Setzer, Alice Kanack, Joan Tower, Derek Bermel, Mark Suozzo, Ira Newborn, and Laura Kaminsky. She holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University.
JEFFREY YOUNG
Jeffrey Young is a violinist, composer, and electronic musician based in Philadelphia, PA who specializes in experimental, rock, and classical music. A native of Brooklyn, NY, Jeffrey spent over a decade as a professional musician in the New York City music scene, where he worked as a freelance violinist and developed a practice of creating music through a combination of improvisation and composition, including work developed collaboratively with his experimental classical ensemble thingNY and others. As a solo artist, he often performs with the software Ableton Live. He has toured the US, Europe, and China, as a solo artist, with thingNY, with cabaret-punk band the World/Inferno Friendship Society, with Switzerland-based ensemble LUCERNE FESTIVAL Young Performance, with bass and violin duo Dykes & Young, with percussion and violin duo Wise & Young, and others. He has appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, the Rachael Ray show, the Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum, and more.
MASUMI PER ROSTAD
Praised for his “burnished sound” (The New York Times) and described as an “electrifying, poetic, and sensitive musician,” the Grammy Award-winning, Japanese-Norwegian violist Masumi Per Rostad hails from the gritty East Village of 1980s New York. He was raised in an artist loft converted from a garage with a 1957 Chevy Belair as the remnant centerpiece in their living room. Masumi began his studies at the nearby Third Street Music School Settlement at age three and has gone on to become one of the most in demand soloists, chamber musicians, teachers. In addition to maintaining an active performance schedule, he serves on the faculty of the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY.
Masumi regularly tours internationally and has performed at many of the most prominent festivals, including Marlboro, Spoleto USA, Music@Menlo, Caramoor, Music in the Vineyards, Bowdoin, and the Aspen Music Festival. His guest violist collaborations include programs with the St Lawrence, Ying, Pavel Haas, Miró, Verona, and Emerson String Quartets, as well as with the Horszowski Trio. He toured and recorded extensively as a former member of the International Sejong Soloists. He can be heard on the Cedille Records, Naxos, Hyperion, Musical Observations, Bridge, and Tzadik record labels.
As a member of the Pacifica Quartet for almost two decades (2001-2017), Masumi regularly performed in the world’s greatest halls including Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, Sydney’s City Hall, New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus and Musikverein, Munich’s Herkuleshaal, Paris’ Louvre and Cité de la Musique, and Berlin’s Konzerthaus among many others. He was full professor of viola and chamber music as quartet-in-residence at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. In 2006, the ensemble was awarded the coveted Cleveland Quartet Award, Avery Fisher Career Grant, and they were also named Musical America’s 2009 Ensemble of the Year.
Masumi is an ardent advocate for the arts, and often sought after as a contributing writer to such publications as the Huffington Post, Strings and Gramophone magazines as well as The Guardian.
Passionate about breaking down barriers that prevent people from enjoying Classical music, Masumi was the founder of DoCha, a chamber music festival in Champaign, Illinois that produced innovative events with a focus on engaging new audiences through fun and inventive programming. DoCha-hosted events featured unique collaborations between members of the University and multi-genre presentations from Classical chamber music to contemporary dance, the spoken word, and much more. All programs were free of charge and took place at a beautiful former community Opera House. Other activities of DoCha, included ‘in-reach’ performances for elementary school students as well as master classes, competitions and performance opportunities for local music students.
Masumi has served on the faculties of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, The University of Chicago, Longy School of Music, and Northwestern University. He has given master classes at The Colburn School, Cleveland Institute of Music, The Aspen Music Festival, Bowdoin International Music Festival, Interlochen and San Francisco Conservatory among many others.
He received his Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School. There, he studied with legendary violist and pedagogue Karen Tuttle from the age of 17 and was made her teaching assistant just three years later at the age of 20. At Juilliard, he was awarded the ‘Lillian Fuchs Award’ for the most outstanding graduating violist. He also won the Juilliard School Concerto Competition and performed the world premiere of Michael White’s Viola Concerto in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, with conductor James DePreist. That same year he gave the New York premiere of Paul Schoenfield’s Viola Concerto with the Juilliard Symphony to critical acclaim. In 2008 he was awarded the ‘Rising Star Award’ by the Third Street Music School Settlement for his musical achievements
Masumi lives in Rochester, NY with his wife Sonia – a concert pianist – and their daughter, Ling. He is professor of viola and chamber music at the Eastman School of Music. He is a D’Addario Artist and has used their strings since 1999. Celebrating a 400 year birthday in 2019, his Amati viola was crafted in Cremona, Italy in 1619.
AMELIA HOLLANDER AMES
Violist Amelia Hollander Ames is passionate about bringing music to all audiences via performance, education and collaboration. She is the founder of the musicians’ collective Con Vivo Music, which presents adventurous, accessible and free chamber music concerts in her hometown of Jersey City, NJ. Since moving to Massachusetts in 2013, Amelia has performed with many local ensembles, including A Far Cry, BMOP, BPO, Orchestra of Indian Hill (where she plays Principal Viola), Monadnock Festival String Quartet, the Portland Symphony, Radius Ensemble and the Rhode Island Philharmonic. She was part of the American Repertory Theater’s productions of “Crossing,” an opera by Matt Aucoin, and “Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812,” and has performed at the BEMF, Monadnock, and Rockport Festivals. Amelia is violist of the Craft Ensemble, a flexible chamber group (though usually a string quartet) comprised of good friends.
From 2004– 2007, Amelia was violist of the Israel Contemporary String Quartet and a member of Tel Aviv Soloists (“Solanei Tel Aviv”). With the Solanei, Amelia toured Austria and Switzerland, and performed with countertenor Andreas Scholl and violist Tabea Zimmermann. The ICSQ, meanwhile, was a mainstay of the Israeli new music scene, and collaborated with dozens of Israeli and American composers, premiering works by Tzvi Avni, Josef Bardanashvili, and Judd Greenstein, and crossing genre boundaries with pop music, theater and dance performances. They were featured regularly on Israeli TV, radio and in printed press, and internationally at the Singapore Arts Festival, Vancouver Jewish Music Festival, and on San Diego’s KPBS.
Amelia continues to devote a lot of her musical headspace to new music. She has collaborated with numerous composers, including Lembit Beecher, Elliot Cooper Cole, Judd Greenstein, Curtis Hughes, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Emily Koh, Lansing McLoskey, Matana Roberts, Erin Rogers, Betsy Schramm, Caroline Shaw, Mazz Swift, and Evan Ziporyn.
Amelia can be heard on recordings released by the Naïve, New Amsterdam, Nonesuch, and Tzadik record labels, as well as on Con Vivo Music’s self-released debut CD.
Currently Amelia teaches strings in the Somerville Public School System and at her home studio. In the summers, she is on faculty at Prelude at Point Counterpoint and the Somerville Strings Camp. She has held teaching and conducting posts at Conservatory Lab in Boston; the Third Street Music School, City and Country School, and Interschool Orchestras (whom she conducted in Carnegie Hall in 2012) in New York City; New Jersey City University in Jersey City; and Hasadna Conservatory in Jerusalem. Amelia has led workshops and master classes in Mexico with Cultures in Harmony and Cuerdas Oaxaca, an intensive strings program, with cellist Michal Shein and violinist Shaw Pong Liu.
A graduate of the Eastman School of Music and New England Conservatory, Amelia studied viola with Martha Katz, Karen Ritscher, George Taylor, and Lisa Whitfield; and improvisation with Dominique Eade, Joe Maneri, John McNeil, Joe Morris and Hankus Netsky.
Amelia lives in Arlington, MA with her husband Christopher, two young sons, and two catahoula leopard dogs (yes, that’s a real breed!).