Classical
Musical magnetism
Composer Cassandra Miller’s music is some of the most tender and truthful being written today
by KATE MOLLESON
© BENJAMIN EALOVEGA
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.