Over the course of her career, Cassandra Miller, a Canadian composer currently living in London, has developed her own idiosyncratic way of composing that she calls “transformative mimicry.” Her music is usually rooted in other music that already exists; she listens to it, sings back a version of the parts, and then either sketches them using musical notation, or, in the case of Thanksong, creates an aural score out of her recordings. In a performance of Thanksong, each member of the ensemble listens to their own part on headphones, and plays by ear. 

For this piece, her source material was the third movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 Op. 132 in A minor, known as the Heiliger Dankgesang, after the thankful message Beethoven put at the heading of this movement. He had recently recovered from an intense intestinal illness, and described the third, a slow movement, as a “Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity.” 

Miller’s piece is one to get lost in. It has few grand milestones, preferring instead a more intimate language of blurred, burbling lines, encoding the feeling of players feeling their way through the piece into the composition. It’s delicate, and personal. 

Hugh Morris 2024