A focus on Cassandra Miller at the 2025 Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik saw the German premiere of her Bismillah Meets the Creator in Springtime as well as Lisa Illean’s An acre ringing, still in a concert on 4 May from Elena Schwarz and WDR Sinfonieorchester, with Miller and Silvia Tarozzi as soloists.
Behind the unsettling privacy of Miller's music lies a longing for security. This isn't conjured up with a show of bravado, but through a shamanic invocation…it is music that leads us back to ourselves, but then leaves us alone again.
NMZ (Christoph Becher) 6 May 2025
A great opportunity to discover a musical language made up of elementary materials…which always seemed to orbit themselves…but generated sounds in continuous, gradual evolution, between an unsettling intimacy and sparkling richness.
Music Paper (Gianluigi Mattietti) 9 May 2025
Co-composed with Tarozzi for the Tectonics festival, the 22-minute work exemplifies the breadth of Miller’s imagination, with its influences including Bismillah Khan performing the raag Malkauns and Pharaoh Sanders’ The Creator has a Master Plan (2003). In the piece, Miller and Tarozzi sing and improvise on toy trumpets, enfolded in an instrumental deluge likened to a swollen springtime river. Keyboard music from yet another great extemporiser – J.S. Bach – patiently unfolds behind these currents.
An acre ringing, still is an 18-minute work for orchestra and prerecorded sounds. Its title comes from the Anglo-Saxon æcer, an “open field” - a measurement of land deemed tillable in one day. Here it evokes in part the turning over, the tillage, of a musical line, in the form of an upward reaching melodic fragment. ‘Ringing, still’ takes on a double meaning, as both ‘encircling, without moving’ and ‘sounding, even now’.
…Illean divides the strings and places a second ensemble in the background, thereby sharpening the spatial depth of the sounds. A still and elegant piece, not an exclamation mark, but rather a dash that lingers long after.
NMZ (Christoph Becher) 6 May 2025
…a suspended, fluid piece made of delicate layers of timbre, unravelling slowly, all in a whisper, with sparse melodic fragments in filigree, like barely perceptible images, hugely seductive.
Music Paper (Gianluigi Mattietti) 9 May 2025
“Three layers of music form a sonorous braid”, says Illean of An acre ringing, still. “They correspond in my imagination to ‘past’ (filtered recordings of piano chords), ‘present’ (a gradual passage of non-tempered sonorities performed by the consort and pre-recorded sounds) and ‘future’ (aqueous and luminous melodic lines, like a slow-motion breeze, or an image just beyond grasp).” It received its world premiere from Ryan Wigglesworth and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in February 2024 – watch Illean discuss the piece here.
The focus at Witten included the world premiere of Miller’s The Years, a 20-minute work for string trio – made up of llya Gringolts, Lawrence Power, and Nicolas Altstaedt – and six voices from experimental vocal ensemble EXAUDI. Cast in three movements, the work is a reflection on mortality drawing on diverse sources, underpinned by improvisations from the string soloists. Its texts are taken from conversations between Miller, Dory Hayley and Michael Finnissy, Bach’s cantata Ich habe genug, and Leonard P. Breedlove’s 1850 song I’m Going Home.
Quatuor Bozzini and Juliet Fraser also performed Thanksong – a prayerful 15-minute work referencing the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ of Beethoven’s op.132 quartet. Bozzini, longstanding champions of Miller’s work, present a new string quartet at this summer’s Darmstädter Ferienkurse, where Miller will be in residence; further performances are planned for TIME:SPANS and Le Vivier.