Biography

Cassandra MILLER

© Andrew Parker

Cassandra Miller is a Canadian composer living in London. Her notated compositions often explore transcription as a creative process, through which the expressive vocal qualities of pre-existing music are both magnified and transfigured. Other compositions sometimes take the form of collaborations and that combine automatic singing and mimicry to create vulnerable and hospitable spaces for deep listening.

Described by The Observer as ‘generous, engaging and unlike anything else’, her music has been performed by EXAUDI, Ensemble Resonanz, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Plus-Minus, Apartment House, La Nuova Musica, Continuum Contemporary Music, and the London Symphony Orchestra. Works have been presented at Wigmore Hall (London), Archipel Festival (Geneva), TIME:SPANS (New York), Music We’d Like to Hear (London), Klangspuren Schwaz, Transit Festival (Leuven), Music on Main (Vancouver), Núcleo Música Nueva de Montevideo, and the Warsaw Autumn Festival.

Premiered at the 2015 Tectonics Festival by Charles Curtis with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov, Miller’s Duet for Cello and Orchestra was hailed as one of the ‘best classical music works of the 21st century’ by The Guardian. Round, composed for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and André de Ridder, was premiered in 2016. Other large-scale pieces include A Large House for string orchestra and percussion, which was premiered at Ostrava Days in 2009 by the Janáček Philharmonic and Peter Rundel.

Miller enjoys a particularly close relationship with Quatuor Bozzini for whom she wrote several pieces including Warblework and About Bach. The latter was awarded the 2016 Jules-Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. Other prizes include one of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s 2021 Awards for Artists and a second Jules-Léger Prize for Bel Canto in 2011. Other close collaborators include the violinist Mira Benjamin (for mira, 2012), Philip Thomas (Philip the Wanderer, 2012) and Juliet Fraser, with whom Miller created the Tracery project and who features on an all-Miller disc ‘Songs about Singing’ on the all that dust label. Two portrait discs from Another Timbre have received wide acclaim, including being featured on New Yorker’s Ten Notable Recordings of 2018.

Recent works include Thanksong (2020) for Juliet Fraser and Quatuor Bozzini, Perfect Offering (2020) for Ives Ensemble, and La Donna (2021) for the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra and Ruth Reinhardt. La Donna has also been performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Finnegan Downie Dear; it will receive its Canadian premiere in the 23/24 season from the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Otto Tausk. I cannot love without trembling, Miller's viola concerto for Lawrence Power, premiered with the Brussels Philharmonic and Ilan Volkov in 2023, and received its UK premiere from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and John Storgårds.

In 2025 it will be choreographed by Or Schraiber and Bobbi Jene Smith for GöteborgsOperans danskompani. The 2024/25 season also sees Sean Shibe and the Australian Chamber Orchestra tour Chanter - premiered by Shibe and Dunedin Consort in spring 2024 - as well as the Finnish premiere of Swim from Ryan Bancroft and the Tapiola Sinfonietta, and further performances of the work from the Vancouver Symphony and Otto Tausk. 

Miller studied at the University of Victoria (Christopher Butterfield) and the Royal Conservatory of the Hague (Richard Ayres and Yannis Kyriakides), privately with Michael Finnissy, and holds a doctorate from the University of Huddersfield (supervisor, Bryn Harrison). From 2018 to 2020 Miller was Associate Head of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, leading the undergraduate programme.

Work(s)

" I cannot love without trembling "

For viola and orchestra

Ed. Faber Music

2024 SELECTION

Verse 1:              To love purely is to consent to distance

Verse 2:              I cannot love without trembling

Verse 3:              Buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God

Verse 4:              Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer

Cadenza:   Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity

 

In the last year of her life, the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote in a letter to her friend Gustave Thibon, ‘Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.’ In Gravity and Grace (published posthumously by Thibon), Weil wrote about the nature of distance and separation, expanding on Plato’s concept of metaxu—i.e. that which both separates and connects—grounding her mystical philosophy in the idea (to summarise crudely) that every absence can be interpreted as presence. ‘Every separation is a link.’

 

Thirty years earlier, following a period of upheaval as Greece resisted Ottoman rule, the Epirot violinist Alexis Zoumbas left his mountain home in Northern Greece for the USA. In New York, he recorded his mournful shimmering music—including several examples of moiroloi, an improvisatory composition of keening gestures and flickering flame-like ornamentation. The moiroloi compositions refer to the moirologia funeral laments of the women of Epirus, and invoke the feeling of xenatia (a Greek word which translates to English as ‘a catastrophic longing for home’). In these recordings, one can clearly hear the immigrant’s connection to the reality-presence of home, through the act—as in Weil’s metaxu—of singing its absence.

 

This concerto is about the basic human need to lament, that is, to speak the distance / sing the separation (in a trajectory loosely narrated by the Weil quotations that name each of the concerto’s sections). It is also about Alexis Zoumbas. Using one of his moiroloi recordings as a source, I sang-along many times (first to Zoumbas, then to myself) in a ritualised, meditative process I call ‘automatic singing’. This method transformed the moiroloi into the violist’s trembling-loving-mourning sighs. Within Zoumbas’ plaintive song, I sought a metaphysical space in which to dream —a space of separation-connection-absence-presence—in the hope to lament and to dream together in this hall tonight.

 

Cassandra Miller