Rhapsody No. 1 is the first solo violin piece I wrote for myself. It draws on inspiration from the Eugène Ysaÿe solo violin works and is intended to serve as both an etude and a stand-alone work. This piece is intended to be part of a set of 6 solo violin works, each of which will be dedicated to a different contemporary violinist, and inspired by an historical composer.

— Jessie Montgomery

Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator 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.

A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery is a frequent and highly engaged collaborator with performing musicians, composers, choreographers, playwrights, poets, and visual artists alike. At the heart of Montgomery’s work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists and underrepresented composers to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces.

Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and Sphinx Virtuosi Composer-in-Residence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. She serves on the Composition and Music Technology faculty at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

This piece or cycle was conceived during spring of 2020 and committed to paper during the autumn of the same year. I believe the changing seasons always play a role in our lives and patterns: our cycles. Therefore it is only natural to require that development to fully understand, or at least more readily understand, anything conceived. I approach creation as a reflection of our experiences immediate and long form, both collective and individual; as they all contribute to the stew in which we ladle.

“A Life Cycle: ex 3” is intended to be performed on any 4-string instrument with an arched bridge and is a response to the massive shift we all encountered as relating to Covid-19, lockdowns, and the subsequent isolation. The piece is a set of instructions with parameters to be strictly enforced and suggestions for approach to be more loosely interpreted. It reflects the human necessity, or my necessity to always expand, to always interpret, to share and learn and explore, both regardless and respectful of situational context.

- Majid Araim, composer

Majid Araim is an Iraqi-American multi-instrumentalist, composer, educator, curator, visual artist, researcher and a fixture of the Atlanta improvisation and new music communities. Majid's prolific work as a composer focuses on resonance and dynamics, experimental approaches, and is oriented towards the natural world and reimaginings thereof. Since 2019, Majid has been increasingly focusing their sights on theatrical interpretation of expression documented in premiers of Cardinal Queen 2019, Regarding Bullfrogs 2019, Excerpts of an Opera 2020, Fragments From Otherwhere 2021, Giants Moot 2022, Extrapolations from Otherwhere 2023, and Regarding Bullfrogs and Universal Power Dynamics 2024; all relating to the large form work Otherwhere, an imagined world existing alongside our own, featuring anthropomorphized animals and magical creatures as characters, accessible to humans only through dreams and meditation and exploring a myriad of themes and subjects, including play, communication, and observation as a representation of the different degrees in which biological systems coexist in any given environment, creating space for the exploration of how we treat each other and the world in which we exist. Majid has given hundreds of performances across the United States and Europe as soloist and in the duo Whispers of Night, as well as experimental music groups such as Atlanta Improvisers Orchestra, BASrelief, The Convergence, Chamber Cartel, Bent Frequency, sunknameless, and Small Peoples Music Ensemble. Majid is a recipient of PREMIER Artist Residency at Georgia Tech School of Music for Whispers of Night’s work with geofons, specialized contact mics for use in ground mediums, exploring communication through filtration of our natural environment; and individual artist awards from Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs in 2024, Fulton County Arts Council in 2023 and 2024 and Idea Capital Atlanta in 2023 to further develop the ever expanding large form work Otherwhere. Also in 2024, Majid received acceptance to the {RE}Happening Festival, held annually by the esteemed Black Mountain College Museum, as well as having a new dance work, “Lifecycle IV: Reflections” premiered at the Decatur New Dance Festival exploring the perspective of our relationship as humans with the nonhuman elements of our ecology . Majid holds degrees in Music Composition and Jazz Studies from Georgia Southern University, and since 2013 has presented over 130 concerts as curator of the Magic Lantern performance series. In addition to their creative work as a musician, they are a dedicated parent, horticulturist, and animal lover.

The Monster Never Tires for solo cello was written in 2014 as the composer was contemplating the tires of so-called "monster trucks", as most of us so often do during our many leisure hours. He came to the conclusion, as most of us eventually will, that in some cases, monsters never tire. That conclusion is reflected in the title of the piece, “The Monster Never Tires.”

-Michael Kurth

Michael Kurth thinks most artist biographies are pretentious and boring, and feels a welcome sense of liberation, not to mention mischief, when writing about himself in the third person. He further believes that all artist biographies should include whether the artist prefers cats or dogs, or is ambivalent. He allows that there is room for ambivalence on this issue.

Kurth prefers dogs.

He also enjoys shrimp burritos, dive bars, road trips, thrift stores, found art, shiny pants, folk plumbing, collecting odd musical instruments, neologism, and bourbon.

Kurth was born in 1971 in Virginia and grew up near Baltimore. He started playing the bass in fourth grade, went to public schools, and got his Bachelor’s Degree at Peabody Conservatory, where he studied bass with Harold Robinson. He also studied cello and viola at Peabody, and did okay at cello, but his ham-fisted viola playing caused his roommate Rick to forbid him from ever practicing it in their dorm room.

He once stole one of those convex security mirrors, just to savor the irony, but he feels a lingering sense of guilt, even though it was laying in a pile of stuff that was probably destined for the dumpster anyway. But still.

Kurth has been a member of the Atlanta Symphony bass section since 1994. 

The ASO has commissioned and premiered many of his orchestral and choral works. A recording on the ASO Media label is scheduled for commercial release on CD and digital platforms in February 2019, including Everything Lasts Forever, A Thousand Words, May Cause Dizziness, and Miserere featuring Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor.

He frequently collaborates with Atlanta poet Jesse Breite on vocal works, including Miserere, Tenebrae, and Magnificat.

He was named “Best New Composer” by Atlanta Magazine in 2017.

He has been awarded Artist-in-Residence fellowships from the Hermitage and Serenbe.

Many Atlanta-area artists have commissioned and performed his works, including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus and Chamber Chorus, the Atlanta Chamber Players, the Atlanta Young Singers, the Gwinnett Young Singers, the Morehouse College Glee Club, the Peachtree String Quartet, the Franklin Pond String Quartet, the Atlanta Contemporary Ensemble, Concert Artist Guild Award-winning violist Jennifer Stumm, the Georgia Sinfonia, the Atlanta Community Symphony Orchestra, the DeKalb Symphony, the Georgia State University Wind Ensemble, and movement artists gloATL.

He teaches bass at Emory University.

Chopin’s opus 17 A minor Mazurka is exquisite. The opening alone contains a potent poetic balance between the viscosity and density of the descending harmonic progression and the floating onion skin of the loose, chromatic melody above. Or, in fewer words – it’s very prosciutto and mint. When someone asks me, “So what is your music like?” – I’ll sometimes answer (depending on who’s asking), “Kind of like sashimi?” That is, it’s often made of chords and sequences presented in their raw, naked, preciously unadorned state – vividly fresh and new, yet utterly familiar. Chopin is a different type of chef. He covers much more harmonic real estate than I do, and his sequences are more varied and inventive. He weaves a textured narrative through his harmony that takes you through different characters and landscapes, whereas I’d sometimes be happy listening to a single well-framed, perfectly voiced triad. But the frame is the hard part – designing the perfectly attuned and legible internal system of logic and memory that is strong but subtle enough to support an authentic emotional experience of return. (Not to get all Proustian or anything.) In some way that I can’t really understand or articulate yet, photographs can do this with a remarkable economy of means. Translating that elusive syntax into music is an interesting challenge. Then again, sometimes music is just music. Gustave Le Gray is a multi-layered portrait of Op. 17 #4 using some of Chopin’s ingredients overlaid and hinged together with my own. It was written expressly for pianist Amy Yang, who is one of the truest artists I’ve ever met.

— Caroline Shaw

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Shaw is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music, an honorary doctorate from Yale, four Grammys, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She has written and produced for iconic artists and ensembles across the musical spectrum, including Rosalía, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Tiler Peck, Nas, Kanye West, the LA Phil, the NY Phil, and others. Recent tv/film/stage scoring projects include “Leonardo Da Vinci” (Ken Burns/PBS), “Julie Keeps Quiet (Leonardo Van Dijl), “Fleishman is in Trouble” (FX/Hulu), “The Sky Is Everywhere” (Josephine Decker/A24), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), “The Crucible” (Lyndsey Turner/National Theatre), “Partita” (Justin Peck/NYC Ballet), “Moby Dick” (Wu Tsang), and “LIFE” (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust). Current touring projects include shows with Sō Percussion, Ringdown, Attacca Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, Graveyards & Gardens, Gabriel Kahane, and Kamus Quartet. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

Commissioned by the Finnish Broadcasting Company for a series of new pieces for cello and piano. The first performers were Veikko Höylä, cello, and Liisa Pohjola, piano. Im Traume was broadcast on radio in April 1981. The work had to wait until the 1982 Ung nordisk musik festival to have its concert premiere. This was the composer's first paid commission, and at the same time her last work composed in Finland. The piece, inspired by the music of Finnish composer Erik Bergman (1911–2006), attempts to capture, in the composer's words, "the logic of dreams" on a musical level.

—Risto Nieminen

Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) was a leading voice of her gener­ation of composers, in her native Finland and worldwide. She studied compo­sition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she lived from 1982 to her death. Her studies and research at IRCAM, the Parisian center for electroacoustic exper­i­men­tation, had a major influence on her music, and her charac­ter­is­ti­cally luxuriant and myste­rious textures were often created by combining live performance and electronics.

After her breakthrough piece Lichtbogen for ensemble and electronics in 1986, Saariaho gradually expanded her musical expression to a great variety of genres, and her chamber pieces and choral music have become staples of instru­mental and vocal ensembles, respectively.

She rose to inter­na­tional preem­inence as the composer of works taken up by symphony orchestras around the world, such as Oltra Mar (1999), Orion (2002), Laterna Magica (2008) and Circle Map (2012), as well as six concertos (including Graal Théâtre for violin in 1994 and Notes on Light for cello in 2006), and five major symphonic song cycles (e.g. Château de l’âme in 1995 and True Fire in 2014), all of which bear the mark of her relentless attempt to blend the scien­tific, techno­log­ical and rational with an approach grounded in poetic inspi­ration and resulting in deeply sensorial and asso­ciative expe­riences.

Saariaho’s broadest public and critical recognition came from her work in the field of opera: L’Amour de loin (2000), Adriana Mater (2006), La Passion de Simone (2006), Émilie (2010), Only the Sound Remains (2016) and Innocence (2020), the latter of which was termed Saariaho’s ‘masterpiece’ by The New York Times, were all warmly received at their premieres, and have enjoyed the rare privilege of global tours and multiple stage productions. Their ever-expressive treatment of voice and orchestra, as much as their commitment to renewing the form and the array of stories being repre­sented on the largest stages, have made these six very different opuses classics of 21st-century opera already in the composer’s lifetime.

Saariaho claimed major composing awards such as the Grawemeyer Award, the Nemmers Prize, the Sonning Prize and the Polar Music Prize and two of her recordings have received Grammy Awards. She was named ‘Greatest Living Composer’ in a survey of her peers conducted by the BBC Music Magazine in 2019.

Kaija Saariaho’s life was prematurely interrupted by a brain tumor in 2023. Her musical legacy is carried forward by a broad network of collab­o­rators with whom she has worked closely over the years, and her publisher Chester Music Ltd.

Edna Alejandra Longoria is a  Mexican-American composer born in McAllen, Texas, and raised in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Longoria earned her Master of Music in Composition from the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music at California State University, Long Beach, and holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Edna draws inspiration from her Latin heritage, as well as from minimalist and classical music. Longoria has recently been selected as one of the composers for the 2024 EarShot Readings organized by the American Composers Orchestra. Edna was a winner of the 2024 SOLI’s 30x30x30 call for scores and has received the 2024 Vibrant Shores Prize for her composition “El Bailongo.” In addition, Edna was a winner of the 2019 LunArt Festival call for scores with her piece “Danzas Cautivas” and was honored with the San Antonio NALAC Grant Award in 2020, as well as the San Antonio Performing Arts Grant Award in 2019. Longoria also has a passion for composing film scores and has won several accolades including “Best Music Score” at the Chandler International Film Festival, “Best Original Score” at the Vegas Movie Awards, and “Best Soundtrack” at the New York International Film Awards. Longoria's music has premiered in the United States, Mexico, South America, Canada,  and Europe.

Inspiración Huasteca is inspired by La Huasteca region in México. La Huasteca is a geographical and cultural region along the Gulf of México which includes several states including the state of Tamaulipas, the state I grew up in. The Huapango is a Mexican folk dance style which originated in La Huasteca region. The word Huapango is a Nahuatl word which translates to “on top of the wood.” The Huapango is danced on a wooden platform where dancers make zapateado dance steps (lively rhythm punctuated by the striking of the dancer’s shoes). The traditional Huapango it’s written in 6/8 or 3/4 meter. I decided to borrow some of the traditional rhythms of the Huapango and combine them with my own rhythmic ideas.

Inspiración Huasteca also borrows minimalist techniques such as repetitive melodic and rhythmic patterns.

— Edna Longoria

Laura was once asked if she would like to organize the “Fun Run” at her children’s elementary school. She replied, “I am not fun,” and they put her on a different committee. That being said, she does like running, and she has fun playing the cello, so maybe there’s hope just yet. 

Emily loves the color pink and wishes her title at work were Professor of Pink Sparkly Weirdness! She enjoys traveling and learning languages, and can order food in more languages than she has fingers. Emily chose to play bass over the cello because “it’s huge!”

Choo Choo loves playing piano, traveling, her husband, and her dog (the order changes depending on her mood.) She practices between 0-8 hours a day and thinks wine and french fries is a perfectly acceptable meal.

Elizabeth is passionate about dance and performing. In her third season with Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, she is grateful for the many opportunities she’s had to collaborate with artists all over Atlanta and is thrilled to be in the presence of ensemble vim’s incredible music tonight.  Currently, she’s working on preparing for The Nutcracker, and has just finally managed to ensure the Candy Cane children know their choreography. Outside of rehearsals, she can be spotted in various parking lots throughout Atlanta (and far outside of the perimeter) purchasing items from Facebook marketplace. 

If dancing was a crime, David would be a repeat offender with no chance of parole. When he isn’t dancing, David enjoys exploring Atlanta, making breakfast and looking for the best coffee shop in the city.

Amalie Chase is a dancer, choreographer, and Halloween-lover. Originally from Philadelphia, Amalie is entering her third season as a company dancer with Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre. Outside of the studio you can expect to find her outside, at Pilates, or at Trader Joe’s.