Faber Music is delighted to announce the signing of an exclusive publishing agreement with Cassandra Miller. Miller is a Canadian composer living in London whose notated compositions often explore transcription as a creative process through which the expressive vocal qualities of pre-existing music are both magnified and transfigured. Other compositions sometimes take the form of collaborations and that combine ‘automatic singing’ and mimicry.
Unsurprisingly for a composer so interested in vocal expressivity, Miller has to-date written two choral works: Guide for eight solo voices (2013) and Rounding for two or more solo singers (2017).
“Rounding is quite an experiment” wites Miller. “Over a period of three years or so I developed a type of composing that involves listening to music in headphones and singing-along to that music, while meditating. I call the method ‘automatic singing’. This process is usually done by myself or by a close collaborator in a 1-to-1 session. My score Rounding was commissioned by CoMA for a book of songs which could be performed by amateur choirs, and it is my first attempt at asking a group to participate in ‘automatic singing’. Rounding is based on a recording of the a Sicilian cart driver’s song, which is transformed in many steps of ‘automatic singing’ before the audience will hear it.”
Premiered by Exaudi and James Weeks in 2013, Guide has since been performed at Tectonics (Glasgow), Tate Modern as part of the 2017 Proms, and most recently at Sound Festival Aberdeen. It received its US premiere in New York in 2017 from Ekmeles. In this work, the singers are asked to mimic (in ecstatic, often dense, canon) a recording of “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah” by Maria Muldaur from 1968. The song is itself Muldaur’s imitation of a recording she had heard of an anonymous singer from Kentucky – a melody full of swoops over a large tessitura that, in Miller’s words ‘sounds like it feels good to sing’.
“[Miller’s] focus [in Guide] is rather on the relationship between the special aura of a particular musical act (usually involving highly expressively charged materials) and the processes of capture: not merely through recordings but through memory and transcription. […] Her work is about the way we make these objects our own, about how we love things and thereby change both ourselves and them. Never are her repetitions simply alienating, nor is the focus primarily on allowing us to ‘hear inside’ the sound-object by stopping the onward flow. They may do both of these, but they also function as quasi-mantras, wherein repetition serves to intensify and heighten the experience: both the vertical and horizontal dimensions (the canons and the loops) of Guide thus amplify the original to emotionally overwhelming effect.”
TEMPO, Along the Grain: the Music of Cassandra Miller, 2014
Faber Music is delighted to announce the signing of an exclusive publishing agreement with Cassandra Miller. Miller is a Canadian composer living in London whose notated compositions often explore transcription as a creative process, through which the expressive vocal qualities of pre-existing music are both magnified and transfigured. Other compositions sometimes take the form of collaborations and that combine ‘automatic singing’ and mimicry.
Unsurprisingly for a composer so interested in vocal expressivity, Miller has to-date written two choral works: Guide for eight solo voices (2013) and Rounding for two or more solo singers (2017).
“Rounding is quite an experiment” wites Miller. “Over a period of three years or so I developed a type of composing that involves listening to music in headphones and singing-along to that music, while meditating. I call the method ‘automatic singing’. This process is usually done by myself or by a close collaborator in a 1-to-1 session. My score Rounding was commissioned by CoMA for a book of songs which could be performed by amateur choirs, and it is my first attempt at asking a group to participate in ‘automatic singing’. Rounding is based on a recording of the a Sicilian cart driver’s song, which is transformed in many steps of ‘automatic singing’ before the audience will hear it.”
Premiered by Exaudi and James Weeks in 2013, Guide has since been performed at Tectonics (Glasgow), Tate Modern as part of the 2017 Proms, and most recently at Sound Festival Aberdeen. It received its US premiere in New York in 2017 from Ekmeles. In this work, the singers are asked to mimic (in ecstatic, often dense, canon) a recording of “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah” by Maria Muldaur from 1968. The song is itself Muldaur’s imitation of a recording she had heard of an anonymous singer from Kentucky – a melody full of swoops over a large tessitura that, in Miller’s words ‘sounds like it feels good to sing’.
Writing in Tempo, James Weeks states:
“[Miller’s] focus [in Guide] is rather on the relationship between the special aura of a particular musical act (usually involving highly expressively charged materials) and the processes of capture: not merely through recordings but through memory and transcription. […] Her work is about the way we make these objects our own, about how we love things and thereby change both ourselves and them. Never are her repetitions simply alienating, nor is the focus primarily on allowing us to ‘hear inside’ the sound-object by stopping the onward flow. They may do both of these, but they also function as quasi-mantras, wherein repetition serves to intensify and heighten the experience: both the vertical and horizontal dimensions (the canons and the loops) of Guide thus amplify the original to emotionally overwhelming effect.”
TEMPO, Along the Grain: the Music of Cassandra Miller, 2014
Miller has also collaborated with the soprano Juliet Fraser on the Tracery project, parts of which feature on an all-Miller disc ‘Songs about Singing’ on the all that dust label. Two portrait discs from Another Timbre have received wide acclaim, including being featured on New Yorker’s Ten Notable Recordings of 2018.