CASSANDRA MILLER: SWIM

A keen awareness of sound lies at the heart of Cassandra Miller’s creative process, resulting in intimate, meditative and deeply compelling music. Her work is shaped from simple materials that have always been there, materials that run through a long tradition built from fragments when grand narratives have run dry.

Miller appears to have fully embraced Pauline Oliveros’ guiding principle that creative work begins with deep listening to one’s surroundings. The impulse behind her music – what the Romantic tradition would call “inspiration”, associating it with a spiritual reality – emerges from a deeply emotional mode of listening. This explains why encounters with her work often awaken a sense of recognition, albeit in blurred, incomplete and indirect ways, through archetypal materials that resonate within new contexts, much as Gerhard Richter evoked the sfumato of Renaissance painting in his own work. One of the most striking aspects of Miller’s music is her inexhaustible ability to place these seemingly disparate materials within new frameworks that cast them in a different light. She achieves this with a simplicity that conceals layers of painstaking craftswomanship and obsessive attention to detail. In her artistic thinking, musical material becomes a question that leads her down unexpected paths. This is why her music achieves a kind of timeless ontological fullness: it never resonates in a vacuum, nor in the realm of pure technical or syntactic virtuosity, but is instead imbued with an extramusical dimension that lends it a captivating semantic force. Her music moves effortlessly along the edges, sounding out what we have forgotten: the voice of the primordial. It inhabits a realm before language and beyond definition, transcending any framework that seeks to contain it.

In today’s richly diverse soundscape, where labels such as “academic”, “popular”, “classical” and “contemporary” have dissolved along with the outmoded debates surrounding them, Miller explores the possibilities of orchestral writing with the honesty of true craftswomanship: the creation of sound guided by a clear artistic purpose.

LA-OBC-015 | RELEASE DATE: september 4, 2026

L'Auditori · Cassandra Miller: Swim

L'Auditori · Cassandra Miller: Swim

SWIM

(2023)

Swim is an atmospheric and hypnotic work of striking evocative power. Among many other themes, it reveals the nature of Miller’s relationship with tradition. Rather than venerating works of the past as monuments – artefacts preserved to safeguard memory or invent traditions – Miller’s creative acts of appropriation allow those impulses to be revitalised within an eternal present that still belongs to our world. This is not a matter of quotation or allusion: the intertextuality at work in Swim emerges from a determined process of listening that gradually becomes an act of personal appropriation. It therefore becomes something far richer than an aesthetic act of musical reference.

The work’s formal programme is shaped by poet Anne Carson’s diary-style essay, “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother”, included in her book Plainwater (1995). In Carson’s writing, water becomes a potent symbol of self-knowledge and the rediscovery of the primordial. Every world contains this dimension because it emerges from the pre-liminal, meaning that which inhabits the “limen”, or threshold. In sonic terms, a kind of “proto-ear” inhabits the aquatic environment described in Carson’s text: dawn breaks over a Canadian lake as mist drifts across the dark surface of the water.

Miller’s interpretation of her fellow Canadian’s thought is filtered through the aesthetic world of Robert Schumann. Moving from the created to the uncreated, she takes the chorale hidden within the fourth movement of Schumann’s Third Symphony and dissolves it into water. The piece enters into dialogue with both Carson, who imagines her missing brother, and Schumann, imagined by Miller swimming across a Canadian lake, propelled by the repetitive motion of his strokes. This repetitive gesture – the swimmer’s stroke – has no fixed destination, much like music itself and human existence more broadly.

Schumann’s Third Symphony provides the timbral and harmonic universe of Swim, mirroring its orchestral forces. However, moving away from sparkle and in keeping with Carson’s text, Miller favours a veiled soundscape achieved through the systematic use of mutes, immersing the orchestra’s sonority beneath the surface. This gives rise to a series of long, floating melodic lines, especially those carried by the horns, sustained and shaped over pedal tones, which stretch time itself by continually postponing an arrival that never comes. From the outset, a murmured ostinato in the violas – subliminal, like an underwater pulse – accompanies these lines as we swim into a slow trance, guided by the expressive use of glissando, which blurs melodic contours. The division of the strings into three distinct planes then generates different sonic layers. While tonal centres are never abandoned, a searing chromaticism rooted in the post-Romantic tradition plays a decisive role in the work’s temporal expansion and narrative architecture. Finally, within a newly emerging sonic plane, dawn is heralded by an abrupt closing fanfare that dissolves into a flute ostinato before fading into silence.Feierlich is Schumann’s marking. Through temporal expansion, the solemn and grandiose are reimagined as something everyday. The dramatic legacy of Romanticism takes on a transmodern quality, moving beyond grand narratives, catastrophes and disillusionment towards a new form of humanism. Miller establishes a clearly defined field of play (Schumann, Carson and the tribute to her mother). Within this intimate space, inhabited by the voice of her mother, the lake swimmer, she is able to unleash the full freedom of her creative imagination.

DIEGO CIVILOTTI

CASSANDRA MILLER

Born in Canada in 1976, Cassandra Miller holds a PhD from the University of Huddersfield (UK).

Miller enjoys regular and collaborative work with performers such as Juliet Fraser, Quatuor Bozzini, conductor Ilan Volkov, cellist Charles Curtis, pianist Philip Thomas, violinists Silvia Tarozzi and Mira Benjamin, and violist Lawrence Power. Her works have also been performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the OBC, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, EXAUDI, London Sinfonietta, I Musici de Montréal, the Plus-Minus Ensemble, Ensemble Kore, Apartment House, Continuum Contemporary Music, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra; at festivals, cycles and venues such as Monday Evening Concerts, Tectonics Glasgow, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, L’Auditori, Angeliza Festival, Archipel, Only Connect Oslo, Ostrava Days and World Music Days, among others.

She has lectured on her work at Stanford University, New York’s Columbia University, CalArts, Royal Academy of Music, Bath Spa University, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Huddersfield Centre for Research in New Music, Brunel University London, and McGill University, to name just a few. Cassandra Miller is a professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London.

OBC BARCELONA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

LUDOVIC MORLOT

FIRST VIOLINS: Jaha Lee – Associate Concertmaster, Raúl García – Assistant Concertmaster, Jordi Salicrú, Lev Mikhailovskii, Ana Galán, Sei Morishima, Ícar Solé, Walter Ebenberger, Ivan Percevic, Laura Pastor, Eugènia Ostas, Kàtia Novell, Francina Moll, Octavi Martínez | SECOND VIOLINS: Emil Bolozan – Assistant Principal, Melita Murgea, Patricia Bronisz, Clàudia Farrés, Patricia Bronisz, Jana Brauninger, Francesc Puche, Alzy Kim, Antònia Escalas, M. José Balaguer, Arturo Seijo, Ivan Launes, Vladimir Chilaru | VIOLAS: Ewelina Bielarczyk – Guest Principal, Rocío Gómez – Guest Assistant Principal, Josephine Fitzpatrick, Sophie Lasnet, Miquel Serrahima, Andreas Süssmayr, Franck Heudiard, Christine de Lacoste, David Derrico, Oreto Vayá | CELLOS: Jose Mor – Principal, Charles-Antoine Archambault – Principal, Marc Galobardes, Vincent Ellegiers, Irene Cervera, Blai Bosser, Lourdes Duñó, Elena Gómez | DOUBLE BASSES: Christoph Rahn – Principal, Dmitri Smyshlyaev – Assistant Principal, Matthew Nelson, Anna Grau, Apostol Kosev, Nenad Jovic | FLUTES: Francisco López – Principal, Beatriz Cambrils | OBOES: Rafael Muñoz – Principal, José Juan Pardo | CLARINETS: Pedro Franco – Guest Principal, Francesc Navarro | BASSOONS: Silvia Coricelli – Principal, Pablo González | HORNS: Juan Conrado Garcia – Assistant Principal, Joan Aragó, Pablo Marzal – Assistant, Artur Jorge | TRUMPETS: Mireia Farrés – Principal, Sergi Serra | TROMBONES: Eusebio Sáez – Principal, Carlos Fluixà, Gaspar Montesinos – Assistant | TUBA: Moisès Hidalgo | TIMPANI: Fernando Llopis – Principal | PERCUSSION: Joan Marc Pino – Principal, Juan Francisco Ruiz, Ignasi Vila

Album recorded from 15 to 19 July 2024 in Pau Casals Hall 1, L’Auditori de Barcelona.