Cassandra Miller: ‘People only really write music for their friends, right?’

The trembling, quivering opening notes of Cassandra Miller’s Thanksong for voice and string quartet feel uncanny. They sound strangely familiar, even though I know I’ve never heard them before. It’s only later I realise that the piece is based on one I know well — the slow movement of Beethoven’s string quartet op 132, known as the Heiliger Dankgesang (Holy Song of Thanksgiving). It’s been transformed beyond recognition.

Miller has described Beethoven’s movement as “quiet, inwardly focused and full of gratitude”, and Thanksong takes these qualities and magnifies them. Although the musicians appear as a group, they each perform independently, listening on headphones as they play, each mimicking a different pre-recorded track of Miller singing lines developed from Beethoven’s quartet. It feels like this technique could generate chaos but somehow there is a serenity to Miller’s slow-moving piece. The performers waver, but it’s their hesitation and uncertainty that ultimately makes the experience become something quite beautiful.

Born in Canada, Miller went to the University of Victoria to study harp performance, but was immediately captivated by composition, later studying it at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and completing her doctorate in composition at the University of Huddersfield. She now lives in the UK, where her mesmeric, introspective music has struck a chord with audiences.

One of her big breakthroughs was the 2015 Duet for Cello and Orchestra, which was chosen by the Guardian as one of the best classical works of the 21st century. Attention has slowly been accumulating since then, but this year her viola concerto, I cannot love without trembling, has received its UK premiere and she’s one of the featured composers at the Aldeburgh Festival, where works spanning her career will be explored in several concerts.

Singing voices allow her ‘to sort of study that person, all the little grainy things of their voice’

Revelling in her early successes, though, was not something that came naturally to the composer. “I enjoyed it but I felt strange about enjoying it,” she says at her London home. “When things are successful, it really emphasises the end result. If you focus too much on the end result and not on the process, then you can really make yourself miserable. That was not a kind way to live, either for myself or for the people around me.”

Her solution was to embark on years-long collaborations with singer Juliet Fraser and violinist Silvia Tarozzi, focusing intensely on the creative process. As she speaks, she brings a panoply of people into the room with us — her tutor Christopher Butterfield and fellow composer Michael Finnissy are among the many names who pop up as inspirations and mentors, and she talks about her colleagues with a real warmth and generosity. “I think people only really write music for their friends, right?” she laughs. “And you can become friends with the people you are writing music for specifically.”

Fraser will be at Aldeburgh to perform two of the pieces that resulted from her collaboration with Miller, whose music is now principally based on two methods. The first is the transcription of existing works and recordings, as in Thanksong. When choosing a piece to transcribe, Miller’s focus is on the human element, drawn to what she describes as “voiceness”. Singing voices are particularly compelling, she says, because they allow her “to sort of study that person, all the little grainy things of their voice, the thing about a voice that makes you feel like you know something about that person”.

Miller’s transcription works — such as Bel Canto, based on a recording of opera singer Maria Callas — zoom in on the cracks, imperfections and quirks that make an individual voice so distinctive and lovingly transform them into something radiant. A vocal vibrato becomes a quivering flute line, a guitar playing pianissimo responds to Callas’s subtle pitch inflections, until the original melody is barely discernible.

The orchestral piece La Donna, which will be performed at Aldeburgh, came out of transcriptions of a form of Italian folk singing called trallalero (“just thrilling to listen to”). In La Donna she’s trying to capture the “physicality of the thrill I feel when I hear it”, inviting the orchestra to “play with that sort of vibrant feeling”.

The second method, also used in Thanksong, involves the performer imprecisely mimicking an audio track while they meditate (which Miller terms “automatic singing”). They have heard the track before, in rehearsal and in previous performances, but the sound of every performance will be unique. In combination, it’s these compositional practices that give Miller’s works their feeling of openness and vulnerability. Automatic singing involves a particular kind of release and acceptance — classical musicians spend years honing their technique to be note-perfect in performance, but it’s hard to produce a “perfect” tone when you are conducting a full body scan meditation and can’t hear the sounds you are making.

Miller conceptualises transcription and automatic singing as processes of transformation; both she and the music to which she responds are subtly altered through composition. When I return to the original Beethoven movement that inspired Thanksong, I do experience it differently. I hear the strings’ tuning inflections more acutely, remember the hesitation of Miller’s performers, feel the echoes of their elongated lines. As composers, the demanding Beethoven and the collaborative Miller couldn’t have a more different ethos. But Thanksong manages to bridge the gap between the two, drawing out and laying bare all of the intimacies of Beethoven’s holy song to transform it into a prayer for the 21st century.

“There’s something magical about letting something internal be vulnerably visible to everyone,” Miller says. Magical, perhaps, because this kind of vulnerability requires a huge amount of trust, not just between performer and composer but between collaborators and audience. Miller insists that she wants audiences “to feel welcome”, but her music asks the audience to make the performers feel welcomed and secure too.

It’s a risky strategy — other composers might not be able to elicit that kind of mutual respect from their listeners. But this openness is part of what gives Miller’s music its power. And what strikes me most about both the composer and her music is their sincerity. Miller doesn’t write music that tries to persuade or impress. She composes what is true to her, and invites her audiences to reflect and to pause with her.

Aldeburgh Festival, June 9-25, brittenpearsarts.org

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