The Changing American Canon Sounds Like Jessie Montgomery

This composer’s music — improvisatory, open to influence, personal yet resonant — will be hard to miss in the coming season.

The history of classical music in the United States is one long identity crisis: the search for a homegrown sound, free from European influence. That anxiety has manifested itself time and again as self-sabotage, with some composers — almost always white men — exalted as pathbreakers, while truly original work coming from artists of color has been overlooked. That has changed in recent years: in fits and starts, then suddenly, with the wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Classical institutions en masse have made earnest, if sometimes clumsy, efforts to rise to the moment and grant overdue attention to the marginalized composers who have always had answers to the question of America’s musical identity. One composer the field has especially turned to is Jessie Montgomery, whose often personal yet widely resonant music — forged in Manhattan, a mirror turned on the whole country — will be difficult to miss in the coming season.