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Performances of Cassandra Miller's Music at the Ojai Music Festival and in Brussels

Jun. 25, 2022

On June 11, Cassandra Miller’s work for string quartet About Bach was performed at the 76th Ojai Music Festival in California. Performers included Keir GoGwilt (violin), Miranda Cuckson (violin), Carrie Frey (viola), and Coleman Itzkoff (cello) in the spectacular outside performance space of the Libbey Bowl.

Keir GoGwilt recently blogged about preparing the piece. "About Bach", he writes, "does more to achieve the transcendent effects that Bach is so lauded for...by endlessly following the most seemingly mundane aspects of practice: phrasing, timing, tuning, and the repetition of small differences. In rehearsing with Miranda, Carrie, and Coleman, I'm reminded that transcendental effects come most readily from personal and particular interactions: the balancing of time, the satisfying work of slow tuning, the calibration of rhythms, phrases, and timbres."

About Bach was awarded the 2016 Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music: the 25-minute piece is an expansion of a solo work for viola written for Pemi Paull. “This is a piece about process”, Miller writes. “I first took a recording of a short phrase (the first phrase in major) of the famous "Chaconne" from Bach’s Partita no. 2, performed live by Pemi. I then meticulously transcribed the recording with the help of some software — this is a process I’ve developed over some years to apprehend the exact rhythmic musicality of a performance.”

“The opening of the piece is simply this transcribed phrase of Bach, with a harmony of my own making, which turns the phrase into a gently jaunty chorale. From there the phrase goes through a somewhat inaudible process that is simply let to run, until it runs itself out. It’s a constant meandering, a non-developmental piece in an extreme sense.”

In her profile of Cassandra Miller for Prospect, writer Kate Molleson described the piece: “..the sound of a lone violin teeters on a tightrope for 25 minutes. Underneath, the other members of the quartet flicker from chord to hopeful chord as though bolstering their colleague’s risky mission.”

About Bach was written for Quatuor Bozzini; their recording of the piece was released through Another Timbre in 2018; it was performed by Ensemble Resonanz in Hamburg last year. About Bach will also appear as part of Wigmore Hall’s day of concerts spotlighting Miller’s music in December 2022. In May 2023 the Hebrides Ensemble performs the piece in Glasgow.


(About Bach/Cassandra Miller/Quatuor Bozzini)

The coming months see further performances of Miller’s music: her Viola Concerto will receive its world premiere in July at the BBC Proms from Lawrence Power and the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Omer Meir Wellber. 

In addition, Cassandra Miller’s Round for orchestra was performed at BOZAR in Brussels on June 18, conducted by longstanding Cassandra Miller advocate, Ilan Volkov.

The 10-minute piece draws on the legacy of recorded music, like many of Miller’s compositions. In Round the melody is a replica of that used by the great Catalan cellist Gaspar Cassadó in his recording of Tchaikovsky’s Valse Sentimentale, and Miller’s transcription evokes Cassadó’s inimitable phrasing and rubato. The waltz rhythm is fundamental to the piece, elaborated and extended across individual groups of strings, which “radiate like spokes of a wheel behind each first-desk player”. The orchestra’s four trumpets are arranged antiphonally on balconies to either side of the ensemble.

Round also has a gentle, soothing effect, Miller noting in the score that the “members of the orchestra are treated as soloists, and can be invited to feel as if they are 48 individual mothers, each rocking a child to sleep.”

Ilan Volkov has a longstanding relationship with Cassandra Miller’s music. In May, he conducted the world premiere of her latest orchestral work, co-composed with Silvia Tarozzi, Bismillah Meets the Creator in Springtime at Tectonics in Glasgow. Previously he premiered and recorded her Duet for cello and orchestra with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; you can hear Volkov and Miller in conversation here on the Halas Audio ‘At Home’ podcast.  

The concert is performed by musicians from the Brussels Philharmonic and ensemble Ictus, as part of a program titled A Walk into the Future, “a wild trip between deep cosmic meditation and delicious futuristic kitsch”. Details can be found here.

To learn more about Cassandra Miller, visit: fabermusic.com.

Cassandra Miller
About Bach (2015)
for string quartet
25'

Round (2016)
for orchestra
2.2.2.2-4.4.3.1-perc: t.bells-str(8.6.5.5.3)
10'

Cassandra Miller and Silvia Tarozzi
Bismillah Meets the Creator in Springtime (2022)
for two voices and orchestra
2 soloists (I: voice/vln/toy tpt, II: voice/toy tpt)-2.2.2.2–2.2.2.0-perc: wine glass/flexatone/wind gong(or cymbal or tam-t)-pno-str(2.2.2.2.2)-tape
22'

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