Three Songs, Cassandra Miller’s fifth work for string quartet, premiered with longstanding collaborators Quatuor Bozzini at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse on 22 July. It is 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. Three Songs will receive its US premiere from Quatuor Bozzini at TIME:SPANS on 15 August and its Canadian premiere at Le Vivier on 18 October.
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 programme also featured Miller’s Warblework, written for Quatuor Bozzini in 2011. Each movement is based on the songs of four thrushes —Swainson’s thrush, hermit thrush, wood thrush, veery thrush, whose songs follow the harmonic series. Miller slows down their songs to reveal human-like melodies, and the piece, Miller says “puts forth something of a poem of the regional sounds from my home and its forests”.
The 17-minute piece also appeared at the PS21 Center for Contemporary Performance’s GROUNDTONE new music festival in July 2025, in the Hudson Valley. Warblework was performed by Keir GoGwilt, Coleman Itzkoff, Carrie Frey, and Miranda Cuckson, as part of a programme curated by Matthew Aucoin for his ensemble. The quartet previously performed Miller’s string quartet About Bach at the Ojai Music Festival in June 2022, and again in May 2023 at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.