Mozart & 
Mendelssohn & Montgomery

Records from a Vanishing City

2016

Records from a Vanishing City is a tone poem based on my recollections of the music that surrounded me as I grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s and 1990s. Artists, truth seekers, and cultures of all kinds defined our vibrant community. The embracing diversity burst out with an effortless everydayness in block parties, festivals, and shindigs of every sort. Partly because my parents were artists – but also because I just couldn’t help it – I soaked up all that surrounded me: Latin jazz, alternative rock, Western classical, avant-garde jazz, poetry, and Caribbean dance music, to name a few.

A year before completing this work, a very dear family friend passed away and it was decided that I would be the one to inherit a large portion of his eclectic record collection. James Rose was one of the many suns in the Lower East Side cosmos who often hosted parties and generous gatherings for our extended artist family. His record collection was a treasure trove of the great jazz recordings of the 1950s, 1960s and beyond – he was mad for John Coltrane, but also Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, as well as traditional folk artists from Africa, Asia and South America.

In the process of imagining this piece, I came across a particular record: Sanza and Guitar – Music of the Bena Luluwa of Angola and Zaire (Lyrichord Stereo, 1974) — part of a series of productions during the time when U.S. record companies had taken a particular interest in traditional music from the African continent. Side A, track 3, titled “Birth Song” and sung in call-and-response by a womens’ chorus, rang with an uncanny familiarity in me as it shared melodic contours with a song my mother sang to me as a child “Lullaby for Jessie” (transcribed by my father Ed Montgomery, and published in Broadside Magazine, #151, May 1984). The poignant connection between the lullabies, a gentle cooing and coaxing of new life, cycling through longing and loss become synchronized in this work. An adaptation and hybrid of these two lullabies connects each of the three main sections of Records from a Vanishing City.

This piece is dedicated to the memory of James Rose.

— Jessie Montgomery

Minji Noh

Piano Soloist for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466

Minji Noh is active as a soloist and a chamber musician, and praised as a “superb pianist” by the Boston Globe. She started her piano career at age nine as a soloist with the Baroque  Symphony in South Korea and subsequently appeared with others like Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, State Academic Orchestra of Ukraine, LA Sinfonietta, Orange County Symphony, La Mirada Symphony, and Bellflower Symphony. Her playing has been broadcast on South Korea’s KBS, Wellesley Public Television, Irvine Public Television and heard on radio stations such as KUSC FM 91.5 and GBC AM 1190 of Los Angeles. During summers, Dr. Noh has served on the faculty of Capistrano International Chamber Music Festival, Concordia University Chamber Music Festival, Concordia University Piano Festival, Amici International Music Festival, and Casa Romantica Music Festival and Academy. She is passionate about teaching and also serves on the boards of non-profit organizations such as Music Teachers Association of California, Junior Chamber Music and California Association of Professional Music Teachers, as well as the faculties of Irvine Valley College and Concordia University. Dr. Noh graduated from both the Oberlin Conservatory and the New England Conservatory with honors, and completed her doctoral degree in piano performance at University of Southern California with Norman Krieger. Her other principal teachers include Ick Choo and Hae Young Moon, Antoinette Perry, Angela Cheng, Patricia Zander and Steve Drury.  Dr. Noh resides in Orange where she manages a vibrant private studio of award winning young musicians.