BU Center for New Music: Jessie Montgomery Showcase Concert featuring BU Faculty and Student Performers

Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Music's Center for New Music presents a two part composer residency with one of the biggest stars in American Music, Jessie Montgomery. Each year, the BU Center for New Music hosts a major figure from the world of contemporary music for an extended residency.

Montgomery is a composer whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her 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, ensembles, and soloists around the world.

In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence. She was named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year. 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.”

Montgomery will be in residence and on the BU campus from January 26-30, 2026 and from April 7-11, 2026. Her visit will include masterclasses, coachings, lessons, and forum presentations. Her work will be featured on January 30th on a faculty and student Showcase concert, performed twice by the BU Wind Ensemble (including on the April 13, 2026 Symphony Hall Concert). Her work will also be featured on the April 7 concert from the award-winning Mivos String Quartet.