Soul Force

Soul Force begins quietly, with a single line or a small group of instruments stating the piece's central idea alone, almost like a lone voice speaking up in a crowd. From there the music behaves like a march that keeps gaining recruits: instruments join one at a time, rhythmic layers stack on top of each other, and the texture thickens steadily rather than all at once. Montgomery draws on the rhythmic feel of big-band jazz, funk grooves and hip-hop's syncopated drive alongside standard orchestral writing, so listen for moments where the strings or winds lock into a groove that would not sound out of place outside a concert hall. The piece has no separate movements or pauses; it is a single continuous arc that rises in volume, density and rhythmic energy toward a full-orchestra tutti near the close, the 'single voice' of the opening now sounding like a crowd. The title comes from the term for nonviolent moral resistance associated with Mahatma Gandhi and, through him, Martin Luther King Jr., and the music's build from one voice to many mirrors that idea directly.

Jessie Montgomery wrote Soul Force for The Dream Unfinished, a benefit concert series pairing orchestral music with the ongoing fight for civil rights in the United States. The piece takes its title from 'soul force,' the English translation Gandhi gave to his concept of satyagraha, a term Martin Luther King Jr. later used to describe the philosophy behind the civil rights movement's nonviolent resistance. Montgomery, a violinist and composer long associated with the Sphinx Organization and later composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, wrote the piece as a musical portrait of a voice straining to be heard until it grows into an unstoppable collective one, drawing explicitly on African American musical traditions to make that point.