Cassandra Miller’s Swim, an orchestral work inspired by Robert Schumann and Anne Carson, receives national premieres in France, Spain, and the USA this winter. On 4 and 5 December the Pacific Symphony and Tianyi Lu perform the work in Costa Mesa, California; the next day Bas Wiegers conducts the piece with the Orchestre National de Metz. On 30 January Ludovic Morlot gives the Spanish debut of the piece with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. On 17 January Swim will also make its third appearance in Miller’s native Canada from Otto Tausk and the Vancouver Symphony, who co-commissioned the work in 2023.
Scored for the same forces as Schumann’s Symphony No.3 (“Rhenish”), some of its material is derived from the penultimate movement’s plaintive brass chorale. Miller imagines Schumann going for a swim, evoking the repetitive motion of his arms, and letting his psyche dissolve in the deep water – not of the river Rhine, but rather a cool Canadian lake described by poet Anne Carson. “The piece is, all told, as much about Carson as Schumann”, Miller notes; each section of Swim explores images from Carson’s essay, “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother”.
Miller writes of the piece,
At first, I took each two-chord gesture of the Schumann excerpt and repeated it, in right-left slowness (and blurred it, as if underwater)…In Schumann’s original, his chords are imbued with heroic, romantic ideologies, sounding grandiose. In Swim, they take on my own ordinary and resolutely non-heroic feelings about swimming, via Carson’s imagery: dull and vivid colours, quotidian repetition, and cold revery.
Swim premiered in September 2023 at the Glasshouse International Centre for Music with Dinis Sousa and the Royal Northern Sinfonia; the North American premiere of the work took place in November 2023 with the Victoria Symphony, conducted by Kalena Bovell. It has since appeared with Ilan Volkov and the Norwegian Radio Orchestra at nyMusikk, Symphony Nova Scotia, at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and with the Tapiola Sinfonietta and Ryan Bancroft.