Cassandra Miller’s Swim, a 16-minute work inspired by Robert Schumann and Anne Carson, receives its Finnish premiere from Ryan Bancroft and the Tapiola Sinfonietta on 10 October.
Scored for the same forces as Schumann’s Symphony No.3 (“Rhenish”), 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” (collected in Plainwater: essays and poetry, 1995).
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.
In April 2024 Swim received its Scandinavian premiere at Oslo’s nyMusikk festival from the Norwegian Radio Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. It 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 returns to Canada on 18 October for a performance with Holly Mathieson and Symphony Nova Scotia; it receives its Irish premiere in December this year from the Royal Irish Academy of Music Philharmonia conducted by Lucy Goddard.