The Canadian-born composer Cassandra Miller often uses existing music as the starting point for her own work. In the case of Warblework, written for Quatuor Bozzini, she incorporated the songs of four North American thrushes. She does something similar in the two pieces on Traveller Song / Thanksong.
In Traveller Song she works with a melody sung by an anonymous Sicilian cart driver that was recorded in the early 1950s, and repeats it with her own similarly untrained voice. The English Plus-Minus Ensemble accompanies her prerecorded voice, which she has built up into several layers. In Thanksong, Quatuor Bozzini performs a rendering of the four instrumental lines of the third movement from Beethoven’s Quartet in A Minor, as they hear them sung by Miller over separate headphones. On top of that, soprano Juliet Fraser slowly and quietly sings material from the same string quartet. The music has a hesitant, vulnerable quality that sets it apart from what recordings usually have to offer. The overall impression is of a fragile humanity.
Traveller Song combines festive and plaintive moods, sounding like folk music being played in someone’s living room. Wide glissando gestures sometimes turn it into a heartfelt lament, as if breaking down in grief together. In Thanksong, the musicians follow Miller’s voice, giving the music a tentative, searching aspect that you wouldn’t normally associate with Quatuor Bozzini. Paradoxically, this album is a daring, adventurous experience.
