Back to the Future Preview: Meet the Composers!
Back to the Future features Pittsburgh premieres of works inspired by past musical traditions from around the world by four of today’s most important living composers: Missy Mazzoli, Chen Yi, Jessie Montgomery, and Gabriela Lena Frank. Get to know these amazing creators, and make plans to join us IN PERSON on November 13 & 14 at the Greer Cabaret at Theater Square!
“I began composing really young, I was about ten. I just fell in love with classical music, I fell in love with performing, with the lives of the composers, and I decided that this was a way into the world, this was my opening to the world,” says composer Missy Mazzoli of her earliest memories composing.
It is no coincidence that Missy’s concerto for double bass and string orchestra, Dark with Excessive Bright, harkens back to musical traditions from earlier musical eras. Her background is firmly rooted in what she calls classical music’s “greatest hits.” She describes an early love for Beethoven in an interview from 2019: “Beethoven’s music really spoke to me in this very deep way, and I almost became obsessed with him. I became obsessed with the details of his life and the way that he thought about things, and the way that the music was put together…”
Originally from rural Pennsylvania, Missy lives in Brooklyn, New York now. She calls New York “the most exciting place on earth” and her love for the city grows daily. Learn more about Missy, her music, and what drives her artistically by exploring this interview (https://youtu.be/ly-lTXg025c)
“I didn’t see a lot of women, and I didn’t see a lot of Latinas in the [classical music] field. I grew up loving classical music as well as musica andina, Andean music from Peru, which is my mom’s home country. English is my first language, but it was always against the backdrop of Peruvian food, and listening to Klezmer music from my dad’s side… and eating Chinese food, because my mom is part Chinese… To me that was so distinctly American: only in the United States would you get somebody like me, born in a hippie campus town, that of Berklee, California, who is partially deaf… that can write symphonies for a living!”
- Gabriela Lena Frank
Gabriela Lena Frank’s music represents a beautiful amalgam of her diverse ancestry, spun into a tapestry that is uniquely her own: folkloric, punchy, and full of instrumental mimicry and lyricism. Frank is as talented a pianist as she is an inventive composer, and her work has won her a Latin Grammy and nominations for Grammys as both composer and pianist. Check out this interview (https://youtu.be/GqrL9srUzCg) to learn more about Gabriela and her music!
At 15 years old, and in the midst of the Chinese cultural revolution, Chen Yi went through what she describes as the “dark period of my life... When I was a teenager, I was forced to go to the countryside to work as a farmer, hard labor work,” she says in an interview with the American Composers Forum. "But after those two years, I was taken back to the city to work as a concertmaster in the opera house orchestra. Then I started to compose for the orchestra.” Her music, which draws on her Chinese heritage and blends Eastern and Western traditions, captures some of the most beautiful elements of Chinese folk traditions.
A Lorena Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri - Kansas City since 1998, Chen Yi has been awarded some of new music’s highest honors, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress, and National Endowment for the Arts. Learn more about Chen Yi and hear the full interview here: https://youtu.be/8b4tYgxFJyU
From a guilty pleasure for nice, frothy cappuccinos to her deep appreciation for the “consistent, driving rhythm” of Nigerian pop music, Jessie Montgomery is a composer and violinist with diverse interests and a rich, vibrant musical language. “Music is my connection to the world,” she says. “It guides me to understand my place in relation to others and challenges me to make clear the things I do not understand. I imagine that music is a meeting place at which all people can converse about their unique differences and common stories.”
In April 2021, Jessie was appointed the next Mead Composer in Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a role that she describes as critical to “centralizing new music” as part of the ensemble’s programming. Jessie is a founding member of the PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, and appears regularly with the Silkroad Ensemble and Sphinx Organization Virtuosi.
Our last live main stage performance before the pandemic (in December 2019) featured her “Starburst”. Here’s a look back:
