For her first release on vinyl, the acclaimed composer Cassandra Miller coils and contorts two quite disparate pieces of music. The first is a song by an anonymous Sicilian cart driver, recorded by the ethnologists Alan Lomax and Diego Carpitella sometime in the mid-fifties, and the second is the famous third movement of Beethoven’s late string quartet in A minor, a ‘holy song of thanks from a convalescent’ as the German maestro at least temporarily recovered from an intestinal illness in the Austrian spa town of Baden bei Wien.
While the caterwauling of her ‘Traveller Song’ might have ‘more in common with a quasi-shamanistic keening than anything Sicilian’ as she enlists members of Plus-Minus Ensemble to accompany her untrained vocals – the drooping and droning winds and strings of the ensemble helping this ‘Traveller Song’ sound like a suitably nomadic picaresque – for her interpretation of the ‘Thanksong’ the composer sought instead to sustain an atmosphere of hushed reawakening and thoughtful reflection.
Miller recorded herself singing along to each of the individual parts of Beethoven’s composition for string quartet, establishing an aural score which she then handed to her longtime collaborators Quatuor Bozzini. Listening to their respective parts through headphones and playing by ear, the Montreal foursome were joined by the British soprano Juliet Fraser, who sings ‘as slowly and quietly as possible’ over the resultant piece.
A far cry from the mannered style of much contemporary music, where Beethoven dedicated his ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ to the deity instead Miller, Quatuor Bozzini and Juliet Fraser suffuse the sacred with the mundane, as a smattering of recording booth chatter towards the close of this eloquent ‘Thanksong’ adds to the air of communality and companionly uplift.
