Biography
Fascinated by jazz and the emerging folk music revival of the 40s, Christopher Montgomery (b. 1931) grew up with little interest in classical music. It was not until college that he experienced the full impact of this music for the first time, especially the music of Debussy, Bartok and Stravinsky. Simultaneously, he was introduced to the seemingly novel idea of composing his own music, and he immediately plunged into this activity, without fear or preparation, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Eventually, awareness of his profound ignorance led him to further study, first with Stefan Wolpe, and then with Roger Sessions at Princeton University, where he achieved his masters degree in composition in 1958.
Not long afterward, dissatisfied with his output, he abandoned composition for several years, only to resume (without realizing it at the time) in the form of songwriting in various "folk" styles. These songs were largely settings of contemporary poets, such as Keith Waldrop, X.J. Kennedy and James Camp. An LP was issued in 1971 by Burning Deck Press. Long out-of-print, it has since become a collector's item, especially in Europe. In time, the desire to work in the classical idiom returned, but with a change in attitude: he had finally learned to respect his own musical ideas, without regard to received notions of what was timely or "progressive" or likely to be approved. A simple lesson learned in a roundabout way, this is probably a story familiar to many.
Since 1975 he has been composing steadily and feeling pleased with the results, particularly with audience response to performances of his work at concerts such as those of the New York Composers Circle. Until his retirement in 1996, he was employed as a librarian at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, where, among other duties, he was in charge of cataloging for the World Music Archives, an important collection of concert and field recordings. In 1993, together with his daughter, harpsichordist Vivian Montgomery, he founded Antiqua Nova, an organization dedicated to the performance of little-known early and contemporary music, with works from both periods combined on each program. In 2005, he received a Connecticut Artist Fellowship (Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism) to produce and record his opera-oratorio Callisto.
Since moving to Massachusetts in 2011, he has devoted himself largely to composing “duo-songs,” songs for voice and a single non-keyboard instrument, a genre inspired by his 1980 song cycle “The Tiger in the Rock.” By simplifying the accompaniment in this way, he has not only opened up a flood of composition unlike any he has ever known, but has also discovered the essence of most of his earlier music, which is “pan-diatonicism,” a term devised by musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky to refer to a technique pioneered by Igor Stravinsky during his middle period in which two or more different diatonic scales (such as the “white” notes on the piano keyboard) are juxtaposed, either simultaneously or sequentially or both. Since concluding these duo-songs in 2017, he has devoted himself to short solos for a wide variety of instruments.
Not long afterward, dissatisfied with his output, he abandoned composition for several years, only to resume (without realizing it at the time) in the form of songwriting in various "folk" styles. These songs were largely settings of contemporary poets, such as Keith Waldrop, X.J. Kennedy and James Camp. An LP was issued in 1971 by Burning Deck Press. Long out-of-print, it has since become a collector's item, especially in Europe. In time, the desire to work in the classical idiom returned, but with a change in attitude: he had finally learned to respect his own musical ideas, without regard to received notions of what was timely or "progressive" or likely to be approved. A simple lesson learned in a roundabout way, this is probably a story familiar to many.
Since 1975 he has been composing steadily and feeling pleased with the results, particularly with audience response to performances of his work at concerts such as those of the New York Composers Circle. Until his retirement in 1996, he was employed as a librarian at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, where, among other duties, he was in charge of cataloging for the World Music Archives, an important collection of concert and field recordings. In 1993, together with his daughter, harpsichordist Vivian Montgomery, he founded Antiqua Nova, an organization dedicated to the performance of little-known early and contemporary music, with works from both periods combined on each program. In 2005, he received a Connecticut Artist Fellowship (Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism) to produce and record his opera-oratorio Callisto.
Since moving to Massachusetts in 2011, he has devoted himself largely to composing “duo-songs,” songs for voice and a single non-keyboard instrument, a genre inspired by his 1980 song cycle “The Tiger in the Rock.” By simplifying the accompaniment in this way, he has not only opened up a flood of composition unlike any he has ever known, but has also discovered the essence of most of his earlier music, which is “pan-diatonicism,” a term devised by musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky to refer to a technique pioneered by Igor Stravinsky during his middle period in which two or more different diatonic scales (such as the “white” notes on the piano keyboard) are juxtaposed, either simultaneously or sequentially or both. Since concluding these duo-songs in 2017, he has devoted himself to short solos for a wide variety of instruments.
Reviews
Callisto: Christopher Montgomery's opera-oratorio based on Ovid's Metamorphoses
28 March 2020 Endre Anaru, Somewhat Delayed Reviews for Classical Music Daily
One of the great masterpieces of Latin literature is an epic series of legends by Ovid. Ovid was a poet in Rome during the reign of Augustus, who was cast out of court for some even now unknown reason, and exiled to a barren, obscure and culturally dead city on the Black Sea. Ovid there took up the theme of transformation as the basis for his vastly important poetry. The poem has been admired ever since by Latin scholars, painters, other poets - Shakespeare seems to have cared for it greatly, by occultists (who find fragments of magical lore lurking in the text), and by mythologists who also find curious lore of pagan legend. There have been many translations of it - including one attributed to Edward de Vere by the anti-Stratfordian supporters. The Metamorphoses are a vast encyclopaedia of knowledge, wisdom and poetical beauty.
One of the legends is the sad - indeed, horrifying - tale of Callisto:
A beautiful nymph, dedicated to the virgin goddess Diana, is seen by Jupiter, ravished by the lustful God, expelled by her companions for her shame - that is not fair, terrorized by Juno, Jupiter's jealous crazed wife/consort, and after horrifying experiences hardly deserved by a young woman, is eventually transformed into ... well, no spoilers.
This work is described as an 'opera-oratorio', but for those of us who might not know, what might be the reason for the use of the two terms. An oratorio is usually a large-scale choral, orchestral narrative on religious themes, performed without costumes. The Messiah by Handel is the best example. Ovid's poem is a compendium of pagan legends, and hence counts as a religious work.
But, an opera is a different form, staged theatrically, with emphasis on the characters, their suffering - usually - and often with a romantic story. In this work, the drama is obvious, the romantic element horrifying and the characters at the mercy of forces beyond their cognizance. For these reasons, I can see why the composer conjoins the terms opera and oratorio to describe his music.
The composer writes: 'To preserve the beauty of Ovid's poem, I have chosen not to use a libretto, but to set the original language.' For a modern performance subtitles might be used, but for this recording, an English speaking narrator tells us the story...
28 March 2020 Endre Anaru, Somewhat Delayed Reviews for Classical Music Daily
One of the great masterpieces of Latin literature is an epic series of legends by Ovid. Ovid was a poet in Rome during the reign of Augustus, who was cast out of court for some even now unknown reason, and exiled to a barren, obscure and culturally dead city on the Black Sea. Ovid there took up the theme of transformation as the basis for his vastly important poetry. The poem has been admired ever since by Latin scholars, painters, other poets - Shakespeare seems to have cared for it greatly, by occultists (who find fragments of magical lore lurking in the text), and by mythologists who also find curious lore of pagan legend. There have been many translations of it - including one attributed to Edward de Vere by the anti-Stratfordian supporters. The Metamorphoses are a vast encyclopaedia of knowledge, wisdom and poetical beauty.
One of the legends is the sad - indeed, horrifying - tale of Callisto:
A beautiful nymph, dedicated to the virgin goddess Diana, is seen by Jupiter, ravished by the lustful God, expelled by her companions for her shame - that is not fair, terrorized by Juno, Jupiter's jealous crazed wife/consort, and after horrifying experiences hardly deserved by a young woman, is eventually transformed into ... well, no spoilers.
This work is described as an 'opera-oratorio', but for those of us who might not know, what might be the reason for the use of the two terms. An oratorio is usually a large-scale choral, orchestral narrative on religious themes, performed without costumes. The Messiah by Handel is the best example. Ovid's poem is a compendium of pagan legends, and hence counts as a religious work.
But, an opera is a different form, staged theatrically, with emphasis on the characters, their suffering - usually - and often with a romantic story. In this work, the drama is obvious, the romantic element horrifying and the characters at the mercy of forces beyond their cognizance. For these reasons, I can see why the composer conjoins the terms opera and oratorio to describe his music.
The composer writes: 'To preserve the beauty of Ovid's poem, I have chosen not to use a libretto, but to set the original language.' For a modern performance subtitles might be used, but for this recording, an English speaking narrator tells us the story...
Thinking Out Loud About Christopher Montgomery
November 13, 2019 • Staff Blog
In this post, Director of Music Vivian Montgomery reflects on her father’s life. This Friday, November 15, she is part of a concert at Follen featuring his songs.
My father grew up in Chicago, where he and his brother went to all the jazz clubs downtown from their early teens. Their parents were fellow travelers of labor communists, my grandfather Chan a sculptor and designer who had apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright and then found work with the WPA, and my grandmother Bets a social worker from so pious a Missouri family that her middle name was Virgin. While rolling cigarettes for his parents’ righteous gatherings, my father also absorbed their political fervor and experimental mindset. At some point in their mid-teens, before my father’s brother Steve was stricken with a mysterious total paralysis lasting 18 months, the two of them organized what sounded like a huge folk festival in Winnetka featuring Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, and other raucous, soulful dignitaries. Yes, there was some more typical musical experience, playing clarinet in the school band, but I think of these settings, their palpability, their sweat, their powerful notions, their intensity, as the truly formative foundations for my father’s music.
At Swarthmore, music wasn’t the focus yet my sense is that it was always there, accompanied by a guitar, some light humming, a little whistling. I know that my parents were together, long before their courtship, at one of the last performances given by Woody Guthrie, in a barn, the proceeds to help the fading master in his illness. I know also that my father experienced something in his senior year similar to what my own composer husband also described: a sudden and irreversible desire to create music, to make composing his pathway to expression. My father’s biography then lays out what unfolded: the neurotic lessons with Stephan Wolpe, the more centered lessons with Vivian Fine, the surprise acceptance into Princeton’s MFA program, studies with Roger Sessions, classes with Milton Babbitt, struggles with torturous oral exams, the depletion that so often emanates from survival of a rigorous and rigid academic undertaking, the alienation from composition of “art music,” library school in Brooklyn, a plum librarian job at Wesleyan University, the start of a new trend in setting hundreds of texts by poet friends as songs to be sung by the composer with the lively accompaniment of a 1936 Martin guitar. We went to many concerts, spent many evenings listening quietly to records, and my father sat behind me while I practiced the piano, occasionally pretending to play like Chico Marx if I seemed to be getting frustrated, so our life was filled with music, but perhaps never so vibrantly as when my father had written a new song, and he’d bring his guitar downstairs from his attic study and sing it for us. I know those songs better than any other music, they’ve been the soundtrack to my life.
As I entered the professional music world, as early as my first two years of college at Sarah Lawrence before transferring to the University of Michigan, I became the ardent advocate for my father’s compositions, working to get them into the hands of all performers, with varying success. He had returned, through the process of being a singer-songwriter, to being what he, in his more clouded moments, will refer to as a “Real Composer” (don’t get me started on the idea that songwriters aren’t “real composers”). I came to know some of those more “classical” compositions almost as well as I knew the songs off of his LP Connecticut Elegy (Burning Deck, 1971). They always have soaring melodies, sometimes incomprehensible dissonance that releases you into warmer sonorities, and some of his pieces have a gnarly counterpoint that becomes the keyboardist’s begrudging job to untangle. Words always prevail in my father’s music, and for this I am eternally grateful because it gave me a good early start in recognizing that very little matters more in musical communication. And amidst the challenges, there’s brilliant humor that surfaces in the oddest places, such as a sudden outburst of swinging Chicago stride amidst ethereal unmeasured textures of a harpsichord piece. This man who has tormented himself while wrestling with the sounds in his mind is the same man who would play recordings of his songs for us backwards on the reel-to-reel tape machine so that they sounded like they came from Uzbekhistan (he would make up translations for the results); the same man who took me to see all of the Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers movies, and sat with me well into Wesleyan’s all-night Javanese Wayang, with its shadow puppets and gongs, until I couldn’t keep my eyes open; the same man who took his guitar and his amp and his poet friend James Camp to Washington Square Park and didn’t stop singing when a heckling drunk yelled repeatedly “Hey, I dig your Afro!” He loves They Might Be Giants and Tom Waits and Talking Heads as much as he loves Poulenc and Monteverdi and Bruckner – I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
It’s important to say these things when your 88-year-old father is alive, when you can still sit together and listen, and then talk about it afterward. It’s easier to say things that might sound like eulogizing when you know he’d say, in a Monty Python voice, “I’m not dead yet!” He certainly isn’t, we’ve got the music to prove it.
November 13, 2019 • Staff Blog
In this post, Director of Music Vivian Montgomery reflects on her father’s life. This Friday, November 15, she is part of a concert at Follen featuring his songs.
My father grew up in Chicago, where he and his brother went to all the jazz clubs downtown from their early teens. Their parents were fellow travelers of labor communists, my grandfather Chan a sculptor and designer who had apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright and then found work with the WPA, and my grandmother Bets a social worker from so pious a Missouri family that her middle name was Virgin. While rolling cigarettes for his parents’ righteous gatherings, my father also absorbed their political fervor and experimental mindset. At some point in their mid-teens, before my father’s brother Steve was stricken with a mysterious total paralysis lasting 18 months, the two of them organized what sounded like a huge folk festival in Winnetka featuring Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, and other raucous, soulful dignitaries. Yes, there was some more typical musical experience, playing clarinet in the school band, but I think of these settings, their palpability, their sweat, their powerful notions, their intensity, as the truly formative foundations for my father’s music.
At Swarthmore, music wasn’t the focus yet my sense is that it was always there, accompanied by a guitar, some light humming, a little whistling. I know that my parents were together, long before their courtship, at one of the last performances given by Woody Guthrie, in a barn, the proceeds to help the fading master in his illness. I know also that my father experienced something in his senior year similar to what my own composer husband also described: a sudden and irreversible desire to create music, to make composing his pathway to expression. My father’s biography then lays out what unfolded: the neurotic lessons with Stephan Wolpe, the more centered lessons with Vivian Fine, the surprise acceptance into Princeton’s MFA program, studies with Roger Sessions, classes with Milton Babbitt, struggles with torturous oral exams, the depletion that so often emanates from survival of a rigorous and rigid academic undertaking, the alienation from composition of “art music,” library school in Brooklyn, a plum librarian job at Wesleyan University, the start of a new trend in setting hundreds of texts by poet friends as songs to be sung by the composer with the lively accompaniment of a 1936 Martin guitar. We went to many concerts, spent many evenings listening quietly to records, and my father sat behind me while I practiced the piano, occasionally pretending to play like Chico Marx if I seemed to be getting frustrated, so our life was filled with music, but perhaps never so vibrantly as when my father had written a new song, and he’d bring his guitar downstairs from his attic study and sing it for us. I know those songs better than any other music, they’ve been the soundtrack to my life.
As I entered the professional music world, as early as my first two years of college at Sarah Lawrence before transferring to the University of Michigan, I became the ardent advocate for my father’s compositions, working to get them into the hands of all performers, with varying success. He had returned, through the process of being a singer-songwriter, to being what he, in his more clouded moments, will refer to as a “Real Composer” (don’t get me started on the idea that songwriters aren’t “real composers”). I came to know some of those more “classical” compositions almost as well as I knew the songs off of his LP Connecticut Elegy (Burning Deck, 1971). They always have soaring melodies, sometimes incomprehensible dissonance that releases you into warmer sonorities, and some of his pieces have a gnarly counterpoint that becomes the keyboardist’s begrudging job to untangle. Words always prevail in my father’s music, and for this I am eternally grateful because it gave me a good early start in recognizing that very little matters more in musical communication. And amidst the challenges, there’s brilliant humor that surfaces in the oddest places, such as a sudden outburst of swinging Chicago stride amidst ethereal unmeasured textures of a harpsichord piece. This man who has tormented himself while wrestling with the sounds in his mind is the same man who would play recordings of his songs for us backwards on the reel-to-reel tape machine so that they sounded like they came from Uzbekhistan (he would make up translations for the results); the same man who took me to see all of the Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers movies, and sat with me well into Wesleyan’s all-night Javanese Wayang, with its shadow puppets and gongs, until I couldn’t keep my eyes open; the same man who took his guitar and his amp and his poet friend James Camp to Washington Square Park and didn’t stop singing when a heckling drunk yelled repeatedly “Hey, I dig your Afro!” He loves They Might Be Giants and Tom Waits and Talking Heads as much as he loves Poulenc and Monteverdi and Bruckner – I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
It’s important to say these things when your 88-year-old father is alive, when you can still sit together and listen, and then talk about it afterward. It’s easier to say things that might sound like eulogizing when you know he’d say, in a Monty Python voice, “I’m not dead yet!” He certainly isn’t, we’ve got the music to prove it.