Cassandra Miller’s choral works The City, Full of People and Guide will receive performances in Ireland, the UK, Estonia, and the United States this spring from Chamber Choir Ireland and Chanticleer respectively.
In April and May Chamber Choir Ireland and Paul Hillier return to Miller’s The City, Full of People, a 16-minute work they premiered in June 2023 at the Louth Contemporary Music Festival. On 27 April they present the piece in Pepper Canister Church, Dublin, and then on 3 May at Cork International Choral Festival. On 22 May they appear at the Norfolk & Norwich Festival – which this year also features a new work by Miller for cello and sustaining instruments from Anton Lukoszevieze and Apartment House. On 25 May they then give the Estonian premiere of The City, Full of People at the Arvo Pärt Centre, near Tallinn.
The world premiere recording of The City, Full of People appeared on Folks’ Music, released on the Louth Contemporary Music Society label. It was selected as among 2023’s outstanding releases in the New Yorker and New York Times.
I succumbed to “The City, Full of People”…it is the sweetest of cacophonies, with myriad overlapping descents from tonic to dominant. Music this uncalculatedly beautiful leaves you almost desperate with gratitude.
The New Yorker (Alex Ross), 22 December 2023
Tallis’s somber austerity has been gently blurred, taking on a circling, overlapping, dreamlike melancholy — and a surprising joy — that partakes of both hovering light and the earthiness of human voices.
New York Times (Zachary Woolfe), 28 December 2023
The City, Full of People was commissioned by Eamonn Quinn of Louth Contemporary Music Society with funding provided by the Arts Council of Ireland and Robert D. Bielecki Foundation. Written for 16 unaccompanied voices, the piece reflects Miller’s preoccupation with longing, lamentation, and return. Its material is derived from the concluding refrain of Thomas Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah I, transformed by Miller’s own automatic-singing as she traced canons in the original work while meditating.
I remember the first time I heard the Tallis Lamentations as a teenager; the choir singing from the back of the church in a dark service during Holy Week. I don't remember if I knew in that moment…that the words meant 'Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn back to the Lord your God', or if I knew about the destruction of the First or Second Temple, or if I had any way to understand these ancient laments for Jerusalem.
What I do remember is the clarity of that message through the music. Tallis' setting of the word 'Jerusalem' is enough to make anyone yearn to come back to a long-forgotten god.
The sixteen voices are divided into 6 groups, who overlap and separates as the piece unfolds. The piece can be staged in different ways, with singers surrounding the audience, spaced out amongst them, or positioned down a central aisle.
In March all-male vocal ensemble Chanticleer tour Miller’s Guide around the San Francisco Bay Area, beginning with St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley on 21 March – full details here.
“I knew right away”, said Miller of Guide, “that I would attempt to write a piece about ‘the feeling of freedom one gets from singing’.” The musical stimulus for the 13-minute piece, premiered by EXAUDI in 2013, comes from one of her mother’s folk records: ‘Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah’, recorded by Maria Muldaur.
On 28 February Guide featured as part of the Oliver Leith-curated EXAUDI programme Thrilly Marvel Chants at Kings Place; EXAUDI previously performed it as part of the focus on Miller at the 2023 Aldeburgh Festival and at Tate Modern for the 2017 BBC Proms. It received its Finnish premiere in March 2023 from the Helsinki Chamber Choir and Nils Schweckendiek and made its US debut with Ekmeles in New York in 2017, who perform the piece again at the DiMenna Centre on 25 May.