In Cassandra Miller’s string quartet, About Bach, 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. Something similar happens in Miller’s Duet for Cello and Orchestra, in which the soloist pivots between two simple notes and the orchestra summons resplendent colours. In both pieces solitary travellers venture on, exposed but resolute as they tread through shifting landscapes.
Fragility can be subversive in classical music. For a soloist or quartet leader to embrace a genuine wobble goes against decades of training; an honest tremble contravenes the genre’s mythologies of heroism, genius and showmanship. Miller, a Canadian living in London, is all about the tremble. She has long been cherished within UK new music circles. “Britain’s background of musical experimentalism means there’s a certain playfulness with simple things,” she suggests; “maybe that’s why people seem to like my music here?” Recently she signed with Faber Music, which should rightly bring her to a wider audience. Miller composes by finding a sonic hook, a “magnet” as she calls it, that shapes an entire piece. Often her “magnets” involve vulnerable sounds, and that vulnerability makes her music some of the most tender and truthful being written today.
Born in British Columbia, in 1976, Miller’s parents were both mathematicians. She has a brother, Emrys, who became a visual artist. “They were happy as long as we were doing things we liked,” Miller says of her parents, as she talks to me from her attic in Leyton, east London. “I have ADHD. When I was a kid there was nothing I liked. I would just sit and stare. I wasn’t interested in anything.” At the age of seven, she became enthralled by a banjo-harp duo she saw busking at a market. Her mother asked if she wanted to take harp lessons. “It was the first time I’d said yes to anything.”
She studied harp at university and took an elective in composition. She knew after the first hour that she wanted to pursue composing. “That moment of realising, ‘I can do that, and I can do it better than half the people you’re mentioning, and I have to do it now.’ I was a pretty arrogant kid,” she grins. “I was good at maths. I just assumed I would be good at composing. It’s a bit more difficult now.”
Is “arrogant” the right word? She sticks by it—“it’s something women don’t talk about a lot, that feeling of confidence in one’s abilities. Though of course it’s balanced by severe feelings of incompetence in terms of how I go about my daily life.” What about “conviction”? “Sure,” she agrees. “More than anything, I know exactly what I’m attracted to, which is the foundation of any creative decision.” What does that creative conviction feel like?
“It feels like finding water when you’re thirsty. It feels like having a whole ocean to jump into when you’re hot. It feels like being a piece of metal around magnets.”
Those magnets again. They have included key teachers Richard Ayres and Bryn Harrison—in both cases, Miller heard their music and instantly decided to move across the world to study with them. (Ayres in the Hague, Harrison in Huddersfield.) Other magnets have included performers such as the Quatuor Bozzini, soprano Juliet Fraser, pianist Philip Thomas and violinist Silvia Tarozzi. And other music—a mournful Greek fiddle tune from the 1920s, the source of the concerto she’s currently writing for violist Lawrence Power, or the overtones of church bells, in the case of her profoundly moving recent ensemble work Perfect Offering.
What these magnets have in common, says Miller, is vocality. “The voiceness of something. When you feel that the voice of a sound becomes a world of its own, there’s an amazing amount of character in that, especially when someone is nervous, or singing as quietly as they can, and we hear the little quivering. It’s amazing. It’s real.” In her work Bel Canto, Miller was inspired by the life of Maria Callas—but not the soprano’s full diva pomp. Instead, Miller zoomed in on the edges of her voice, the swoops and decays. “The path of the piece is not only about the ageing of an extraordinary woman,” she explains, “but also about the listener. Time slows down to allow for an engagement with detail, for a submersion in the sound, and for meditative stillness.”
Maybe this explains why Miller recently started using her own voice in performance, even though, by her own account, she is no singer. Certainly, it explains the rare intimacy she gets from polished performers like Lawrence Power and Juliet Fraser. These soloists find ways to go to unguarded places. “Ways of projecting very internal sounds. A sort of resonant introversion.” And that is what Miller’s clarion conviction opens up—a veneration of the vulnerable.
