On a gloomy winter's night in Dalston what could be better than Kammerklang at Café OTO? Out of the cold and into a packed house – standing room only for many of us, and sauna-like levels of humidity – for an evening in which an audio-visual piece about bells by Christine Sun Kim and a new string quartet by Lisa Illean frame the main event, two new pieces by the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller.
First is Tracery: Hardanger, for solo voice and pre-recorded voice. It begins with a repeated, sustained sung tone and, from where I am standing, it is not immediately clear whether it is live or pre-recorded, but soon Juliet Fraser adds live ornamentations around the repeated note: strange, half-strangled ululations, not like any sound I've ever heard this wonderful singer make before. Each phrase is the length of a breath, usually with a falling melodic trajectory. Sometimes the live melody anticipates the sustained note, sometimes it follows. We could be listening to the resident singer in the coolest club in town, somewhere high in the Arctic: maybe Norway, maybe Greenland, maybe on the edge of Hudson Bay.
After a while the roles reverse. The live singer has the long notes, a tone lower than before, and her pre-recorded self weaves more elaborate, almost skittish patterns, less obviously drawn by the gravitational pull of the sustained tone. Then both Juliets are singing melodies, and not so long afterwards the music finishes. It isn't obvious that the end is coming but it feels right when it happens. It's as if we have been listening to a great executant of a folk music that didn't exist until Cassandra Miller and Juliet Fraser got together to create it, but this is undoubtedly how that music is supposed to go, and this is how, unostentatiously but surely, this piece is supposed to finish. It's a considerable achievement: music that is not so much composed as inhabited.
After a short interval it's the turn of the ensemble Plus Minus to play. In Traveller Song there are more pre-recorded voices, cascading, multi-layered variations of more descending melodies, like a congregation in an Old Regular Baptist church, each singer ‘laboring’ their own version of a shared hymn tune. Two pianists at a single piano play unison triadic harmonies which try, as best they can, to shadow the multiple melodies in the loudspeakers. Eventually they stop; a pause, then the rest of the ensemble – clarinet, electric guitar with e-bow, violin, cello – slide down their own various versions of the taped voices, now fewer, often only one. The pianists play again: a unison A major chord played many, many times; then a cadence, also repeated. They stop and one of them takes over the violinist's seat in the ensemble. He's got an accordion and using just the chord buttons he offers one more accompaniment for the pre-recorded voice. As in Tracery: Hardanger, the music ends unabtrusively, but decisively; like Juliet Fraser, Plus Minus give an exemplary performance, their understated virtuosity illuminating every moment of the music.
Like much of Miller's music – most spectacularly in Duet for cello and orchestra, premiered at the 2015 Glasgow Tectonics festival, most intimately in the string quartet Warblework (2011) – transcription lies at the heart of the compositional process. So Traveller Song is based on a recording of a Sicilian folksong, and on the Kammerklang website Miller describes how she turned the song into her own music: ‘I sang along while listening to this recording in headphones loud enough that I couldn't hear myself, and recorded this caterwauling, layered this recording in canon, and listened again, recording myself singing along again, following this process many times’. Similarly, so Miller tells us, Tracery: Hardanger uses ‘source materials … from non-notated traditions such as Hardanger fiddle tunes, Sacred Harp singing, experimental improvisations and spoken meditations’.
For Cassandra Miller it is clearly important to explain how she made this extraordinary music. But I don't think the ‘how’ of this music is as important as the ‘what’; it may be made through a process of transcription but it's not about transcription. Falling lines – sometimes melodies, sometimes not – are a recurrent feature of much of Cassandra Miller's music: the multiple string glissandi of A Large House (2009), the lamentations of bel canto (2010). Sometimes they make me feel sad, as keening is supposed to, but more often they sound to me like lava snaking down a hillside, vivid, compelling, not a little dangerous. In Tracery: Hardanger and Traveller Song there's a change in energy in each phrase, as the breath runs out, as the line descends, yet the music doesn't seem to be about entropy, rather it's about an alchemy in which one thing turns into another – fire into stone, sound into notation, flow into solid – and, even more remarkably, back again.
