Cassandra Miller’s The City, Full of People received its Canadian premiere at the West End Micro Music Festival in Toronto on 22 November. It appeared as part of the ‘Ecstatic Voices’ programme, conducted by Simon Rivard, alongside music by Luciano Berio, Claude Vivier, Caroline Shaw, and the Thomas Tallis Lamentations that inspired the work. The festival also sees performances of Miller’s Perfect Offering for ensemble on 29 and 30 November.
The City, Full of People, a 16-minute work for sixteen unaccompanied voices, 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. Miller writes:
Tallis' setting of the word 'Jerusalem' is enough to make anyone yearn to come back to a long-forgotten god. I suppose I've become a non-believer over the years; always holding a vague but deep-felt sense that I might need to return one day. In my wanderings (certainly aimless when compared to my youth), I have turned to company and community in lieu of a spiritual life. This composition – with each duo and trio as a congregation of its own – celebrates that scenario, both for its beauty and its incompleteness.
The sixteen voices are divided into 6 groups, whose music alternately overlaps and separates as the piece unfolds. The singers may choose to face slightly towards the audience while still maintaining a close group connection. The piece can be staged in different ways, with singers surrounding the audience, spaced out amongst them, or positioned down a central aisle.
On 12 November The City, Full of People was named Best Choral Composition at the 2024 Classical Ivors. The judging panel felt that Miller’s piece “radiates an ecstatic quality, exquisitely crafted with originality and sophistication, creating a meditative and immersive experience”, noting that “the composition feels both deeply personal and universally resonant, making it a truly transformative journey for the senses.” It will tour with Manchester-based Kantos Chamber Choir in April 2025 alongside the Tallis Lamentations and David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion.
The world premiere recording of The City, Full of People from Chamber Choir Ireland and Paul Hillier was hailed as one of 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