Listen to an audio version of this interview above.
I’ve known Cassandra Miller for about a decade, but sometimes it feels a lot longer than that. I had heard about her music from the late musicologist Bob Gilmore, who had a fascination for the world of Canadian experimentalism. Gentler, less world-bestriding than the equivalent scene in the US, the Canadians seemed to capture their own peculiar form of absurdism – and tenderness – that was tremendously refreshing.
Influence among composers often operates as a kind of permission-giving. Seeing that something is possible for someone else, one feels it might be possible for you too. At least, that’s how Cassandra’s music (and later her friendship) affected me. It’s arguably affected lot of other British composers in the same way.
In December last year we spoke at her flat in Leyton, the day after a concert at Café Oto by the Phaedra Ensemble, which had featured her work Thanksong, alongside a new piece by the singular British composer Leo Chadburn (also her flatmate). Crucial to Miller’s recent music has been an interest in vocality: in how melodic phenomena are embodied, in singing and vocal performance. Thanksong combines instrumental sounds with vocalisations from all the musicians, right at the edge of audibility. It reminded me of listening to my sister, aged four or five, singing herself to sleep.
I began by asking what she sang to herself when she was a child. “I used to really like going for walks by myself. I grew up in the countryside, and it was the 80s, so kids could go for long walks without adults. I used to go on these epic long journeys – I would go climb rocks on the beach, and I’d often end up in this wilderness park called Devonian Park, and I would sit along the bridle trail where there were least likely to be any other humans. I’d sit under a tree and sing what I remembered of hymn tunes, to myself, really loudly, and occasionally someone would walk by and I’d be a little embarrassed – and just as they left, I’d keep going.”
It would be some years before vocality would become a central concern in Miller’s music. “I remember the first time. There’s a piece that I wrote in 2008-9 called Bel Canto. Before that, I think I wasn’t particularly interested in vocality. I’d written several pieces that were somewhat abstract in comparison to what I write now.”
Miller tells me about several unpublished pieces written when she was younger. “I have this piece for cello and three basses and two recorders,” she says. “The basses all race with each other, the recorders play this Bach excerpt, but with all the vocality taken out of it. It was almost the opposite of exploring vocality! Then I had a piece for 8 timpani played with knitting needles, which honestly sounds great, but there’s no melody in that either. A piece for viola and harpsichord: no melody in that, just strings of notes.”
Bel Canto differed from these previous works not only in its fascination with vocal performance, but also in how important singing became to the composition process itself. “One day I thought: I’m not going to look at the draft score. I’m just going to close my eyes and sing my way through the material – and I found there were certain gestures that felt really good to repeat.”
Taking as its starting point the vocal performance of Maria Callas, Bel Canto initiated a series of musical developments that eventually led to a doctorate at Huddersfield. (Cassandra and I were both supervised by Bryn Harrison at the same time. We both arrived at the department with an interest in melody.) “During one lesson with Bryn, I said: what is it about melody? There’s something about melody that I’m trying to get at. Somehow we both realized in that meeting that it wasn’t just melody: it was the vocality of the melody. We really have Kristine Healy to thank for that. After then, that word vocality became a central topic, and I could do it more purposely.” Flautist and musicologist Kristine Healy went on to organise the conference Vocality/Instrumentality in 2017, an important event for many of us in the department at the time.
Miller’s recent piece, Bismillah meets the Creator in Springtime, co-created by herself and improvising violinist Silvia Tarozzi, positions vocal performance among a scattered forest of orchestral musicians. Miller sits on stage listening to earphones, singing along to recordings. Tarozzi, meanwhile, performs on a toy trumpet. The combination of tenderness and absurdism is inexplicable and affecting. “The piece became an onstage manifestation of our working relationship, which was very informal: we would just be messing around, having fun, in her studio, and then things would suddenly be on an orchestral stage,” Miller says. “These toy trumpets that sound like dying ducks – the sound is so moving!”
The inspiriation for this work came from shehnai player Ustad Bismillah Khan, and musical borrowing has become a crucial part of Miller’s working method. Other recent pieces have adopted material from musicians as various as Maria Muldaur, Kurt Cobain, Maria Carta, The Slits, and Alexis Zoumbas. Co-creation with collaborators, such as Juliet Fraser, has also been crucial in these pieces’ development.
“When it comes down to it, what it feels like – as I’m writing on a day-to-day basis – is that I’m just trying to learn stuff. This is my main job, in life: just to show up and learn. When I hear some music that moves me, I find that so intriguing. I’m drawn to working with it, and to try to exist within it, and find out what it is. There’s so many millions of humans in the world who have made amazing music, and I just want to learn from them, that’s all.”
“If I’m doing automatic singing – where I’m singing along to something, and letting my body react somewhat impulsively – then I’m learning how my body reacts, how it listens,” Miller says. “That’s just learning about music. And then when I do it with a collaborator, I’m learning how their body reacts, how their body listens. It’s all just learning.”
These smaller works for individuals and chamber groups are contrasted with several works for large ensembles and orchestras, including the Duet for Cello and Orchestra, written for Charles Curtis, and I cannot love without trembling, written for violist Lawrence Power. But they’re often composed using remarkably similar processes – even if the eventual musical result is on a greatly different scale.
“I wrote the Viola Concerto through a process of automatic singing, by being vulnerable with myself, and by learning, in a very intimate way – similar to Thanksong,” Miller tells me. “But then to translate that to the orchestral stage… every piece has a different solution, but when I think about that situation, what is it that Lawrence Power does on stage that’s different to Thanksong?
“Being on a performance stage that size, I think it has to do with masks. There’s something really beautiful about the way that masks can reveal something about a person – more than would be revealed than if they didn’t have a mask on. That’s what’s powerful on the orchestral stage.”
Miller’s latest concerto project is coming up in April, but in December she was still in the midst of the compositional process. “I’m currently writing a piece for Sean Shibe with the Dunedin Consort. I had never written anything soloistic for guitar before. It’s been such a challenge – I had to spend months getting into what I love about the guitar. I know that I like the guitar, but what specifically do I love about it? And how to turn that into a piece? It’s been one of the most satisfying things, to have a legit challenge! To have to learn stuff like I know nothing, because learning stuff does take a long time, it’s not just learning practical things, I have to incorporate it in my body…”
I finish by returning to a question we’d talked about a few years earlier. Is she still interested in making audiences cry? Can a piece be a success if audiences don’t cry at it? “Well I’m quite embarrassed to answer! But I’ve definitely not given up on the idea.” (Miller had once told me she’d been quite keen to jettison this aim.) “I’d phrase it differently now. I think it would be about me as a listener, as opposed to everyone else. I am loosening up my grip on trying to control how other people think about me. It’s a privilege of middle age – and a real privilege of having a publisher, as my public image is really their job now. My job is hard enough: it’s hard enough to write music!”
“But actually, I’m really glad that we’re talking about this in this context, because it’s making me realise that that’s not the goal either.” Is there a deeper goal, I ask? “It’s still about learning. If something happened to me, physically, during listening, then I’ve learned something. I’ve learned: that music did that. If something makes me cry – or laugh, or shiver – something happened. That’s the location of learning, and my composition practice is about trying to go to that location. In the end, it’s all about delving into the mysterious: if something has happened to me because of something I’ve heard, it’s usually mysterious.”
The premiere of Cassandra Miller’s Chanter for guitar and strings is given by Sean Shibe and the Dunedin consort at the Barbican on 11th April.
See forthcoming performances of music by Cassandra Miller.
