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Quatuor Bozzini Premieres Cassandra Miller’s Three Songs in Darmstadt and NYC

Aug. 25, 2025

Three Songs, Cassandra Miller’s fifth work for string quartet, premiered with longstanding collaborators Quatuor Bozzini at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse on July 22. It is the first time Miller’s music has been featured at the summer school and her first time teaching on the celebrated program. The work was commissioned by Le Vivier, TIME:SPANS, Soundstreams, the Darmstadt Summer Course, and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Quatuor Bozzini performed the US premiere of Three Songs at TIME:SPANS on August 15 and will perform the Canadian premiere at Le Vivier on October 18.

Three Songs is a 20-minute work is cast in three movements, each inspired by singing. French children’s rhymes provide the basis of the first two movements. ‘Ange’ sees peacefully rocking gestures take on a yearning character, with a muted second violin set apart timbrally from the rest of the group. ‘Claire," drawing on ‘À la claire fontaine,’ a children’s song traditionally popular in Canada, has a lilting dance-like character, and is pizzicato almost throughout, until a tender coda. ‘Bella’ turns to the Mondine choirs of Italy’s Po Valley. The players are called on to channel the songs of the female seasonal workers who tended the rice paddies of the region, working in brutal, backbreaking conditions, and who sang popular songs of resistance, protest, love, hope, and humour: here the music draws on the revolutionary antifascist anthem Bella ciao.

The program in Darmstadt also featured Miller’s Warblework, written for Quatuor Bozzini in 2011. Each movement is based on the songs of four thrushes — Swainson’s thrush, hermit thrush, wood thrush, veery thrush, whose songs follow the harmonic series. Miller slows down their songs to reveal human-like melodies, and the piece, Miller says, “puts forth something of a poem of the regional sounds from my home and its forests.”


Quatuor Bozzini performs Cassandra Miller's Warblework

The 17-minute piece also appeared at the PS21 Center for Contemporary Performance’s GROUNDTONE new music festival in July 2025, in the Hudson Valley. Warblework was performed by Keir GoGwilt, Coleman Itzkoff, Carrie Frey, and Miranda Cuckson, as part of a program curated by Matthew Aucoin for his ensemble. The quartet previously performed Miller’s string quartet About Bach at the Ojai Music Festival in June 2022, and again in May 2023 at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.

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

Cassandra Miller
Three Songs (2025)
for string quartet
   I. Ange
   II. Claire
   III. Bella
20'

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