On 4 April experimental music collective Wild Up perform Cassandra Miller’s Perfect Offering, Thanksong and Warblework at The Nimoy, UCLA, alongside works by Catherine Lamb.
Perfect Offering is an 18-minute work for work for flute, clarinet, piano, and string quartet. Alex Ross described the piece, which was premiered and later recorded by Explore Ensemble, as “extraordinarily beautiful”. Miller first began drafting the piece during a period of convalescence, which also overlapped with the early days of lockdown. She recalls,
At that time, I had the quote in my head ‘ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering’ (Leonard Cohen), and the piece began to be about bells somehow—how they swing, and how they mark passing time. The piece is not at all about Leonard Cohen, but with this mantra-like quote in mind, the process of composing became a meditation on the imperfect perfection of this tiring body and all the uselessness of plans.
Perfect Offering was commissioned for the Ives Ensemble by De Link, Nieuwe Muziek Tilburg, who gave the first performance in the Netherlands in 2020. It received its US premiere at Northwestern University from their Contemporary Music Ensemble in April 2024.
Thanksong’s title references the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ from Beethoven’s op.132 string quartet, summoning the opening’s prayerful and inward mood. The quartet plays gentle pendulum-like gestures while listening in headphones to Miller’s voice – whilst the vocalist intones, as slowly and quietly as possible, Beethoven’s original melodic line, to the words ‘thank you’. The 15-minute work received its first live performances at the Dartington International Summer School and Wigmore Hall in 2022, after an online premiere in 2020 in a video created by TIME:SPANS; it has since been performed by Phaedra Ensemble (with Lotte Betts-Dean and Rosie Middleton) and by Ensemble Resonanz with legendary German producer and punk musician Richard von der Schulenburg.
Also created for Quatuor Bozzini in 2011, Miller’s 17-minute Warblework is a based on birdsong: 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. “When these birdsongs are slowed down”, Miller observed, “they reveal incredibly human-like melodies…While the thrushes move through the harmonic series, a tune in slow motion reveals melodies almost resembling folk and jazz vocality from another time.”
Miller’s latest work for the Bozzinis appeared at Soundstreams on 21 March. Three Songs is a 20-minute piece cast in three movements. It is also inspired by singing, but of human rather than avian variety; it was commissioned by Le Vivier, TIME:SPANS, Soundstreams, Darmstadt Summer Course and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
French children’s rhymes provide 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. In a celebration of the female seasonal workers who tended the region’s rice paddies, it draws on the revolutionary antifascist anthem Bella ciao.