Three Songs, Cassandra Miller’s latest work for string quartet, received its Canadian premiere at Le Vivier on 18 October from Quatuor Bozzini. Longstanding Miller collaborators, the quartet premiered it in July 2025 at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse on 22 July – the first time Miller’s music has been featured at the summer school and her first time teaching on the celebrated programme. It was commissioned by Le Vivier, TIME:SPANS, Soundstreams, Darmstadt Summer Course and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and made its US debut at TIME:SPANS on 15 August.
The 20-minute work is cast in three movements, each inspired by singing. French children’s rhymes providing the basis of the first two movements. ‘Ange’ sees peacefully rocking gestures take on a yearning character, with a muted second violin set apart timbrally from the rest of the group. ‘Claire’, drawing on ‘À la claire fontaine’, a children’s song traditionally popular in Canada, has a lilting dance-like character, and is pizzicato almost throughout, until a tender coda.
‘Bella’ turns to the Mondine choirs of Italy’s Po Valley. The players are called on to channel the songs of the female seasonal workers who tended the rice paddies of the region, working in brutal, backbreaking conditions, and who sang popular songs of resistance, protest, love, hope, and humour: here the music draws on the revolutionary antifascist anthem Bella ciao.
The piece, Miller writes,
…is about the joy of learning new things about old friends...a continuation of a long friendship with the Quatuor Bozzini which began in 2009. When we started working on this piece, I asked the quartet many questions, including what songs they sang as children, or perhaps to their children…These three French and Italian folk / campfire songs were sang to me by the quartet members, and I have treated them almost as lullabies.
Miller’s string quartet Warblework – created for the Bozzinis in 2011 – receives performances in London at the end of November from the Ligeti Quartet (27 November) at Milton Court and the Solem Quartet (29 November) at Kings Place. The 17-minute work is also based on songs, but of avian rather than human origin: each of its four movements draws on the singing of four different kinds of thrushes, recalling the regional sounds of Miller’s Canadian home and its forests.