Jessie Montgomery’s Expanding Canon

Montgomery is not only reshaping the sound of American concert music—she is reimagining the structures through which it is taught, transmitted, and valued. As a composer, violinist, and educator, her work bridges formal rigor with expressive immediacy. But increasingly, her influence extends beyond the stage into the classroom, where she is quietly reconfiguring the classical curriculum to reflect a broader, more pluralistic understanding of music and its purpose.

Her compositions—performed by major orchestras across the country—blend vernacular idioms with classical form, and improvisation with precise architecture. That same fluidity defines her pedagogical approach. Whether teaching at conservatories, mentoring emerging composers, or shaping institutional partnerships, Montgomery treats music education as a living practice: one that must evolve in dialogue with the world around it.

Through roles at institutions such as Juilliard, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Northwestern University, Montgomery is helping dismantle long standing assumptions about what constitutes core knowledge in classical music. Rather than treating improvisation as supplemental or folk traditions as peripheral, her work places these modes of expression at the center of artistic development. In her classrooms, form is not a fixed inheritance—it is something malleable, something to be questioned and repurposed.

Montgomery’s influence also extends through her residencies with organizations like the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where she has initiated mentorship programs and commissioning projects that amplify underrepresented voices. She does not simply advocate for inclusion; she designs the systems through which inclusion becomes sustainable. Her educational initiatives focus not only on diversifying repertoire, but on rethinking the foundational frameworks—notation, canon, critique—through which music is taught and evaluated.

The curriculum she advances is one rooted in collaboration and curiosity, with the conviction that creative fluency comes from engaging with multiple lineages and perspectives. It resists binaries of classical and popular, written and oral, tradition and innovation. Her teaching foregrounds listening as a compositional act, and interpretation as a form of authorship.

What emerges is not just a more inclusive pedagogy, but a more honest one—one that recognizes the complexity of American musical identity and the many silenced contributions that have shaped it. Montgomery’s work asks educators, students, and institutions alike to see the classroom not as a gatekeeping mechanism, but as a space of encounter, reflection, and redefinition.

In an era when conservatories and orchestras are reckoning with what it means to serve the future, Jessie Montgomery offers a model that is neither reactive nor rhetorical. It is rooted in practice, sustained by community, and propelled by the belief that musical excellence is not diminished by difference, but deepened by it.