Co-commissioned by BBC Radio 3, Brussels Philharmonic, Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, and Scottish Chamber Orchestra, supported by The Viola Commissioning Circle

Verse 1: To love purely is to consent to distance
Verse 2: I cannot love without trembling
Verse 3: Buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God
Verse 4: Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer
Cadenza: Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity

In the last year of her life, the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote in a letter to her friend Gustave Thibon, ‘Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.’ In Gravity and Grace (published posthumously by Thibon), Weil wrote about the nature of distance and separation, expanding on Plato’s concept of metaxu – i.e. that which both separates and connects – grounding her mystical philosophy in the idea (to summarise crudely) that every absence can be interpreted as presence. ‘Every separation is a link.’

Thirty years earlier, following a period of upheaval as Greece resisted Ottoman rule, the Epirot violinist Alexis Zoumbas left his mountain home in Northern Greece for the USA. In New York, he recorded his mournful shimmering music – including several examples of moiroloi, an improvisatory composition of keening gestures and flickering flame-like ornamentation. The moiroloi compositions refer to the moirologia funeral laments of the women of Epirus, and invoke the feeling of xenatia (a Greek word which translates to English as ‘a catastrophic longing for home’). In these recordings, one can clearly hear the immigrant’s connection to the reality-presence of home, through the act – as in Weil’s metaxu – of singing its absence.

This concerto is about the basic human need to lament, that is, to speak the distance / sing the separation (in a trajectory loosely narrated by the Weil quotations that name each of the concerto’s sections). It is also about Alexis Zoumbas. Using one of his moiroloi recordings as a source, I sang-along many times (first to Zoumbas, then to myself) in a ritualised, meditative process I call ‘automatic singing’. This method transformed the moiroloi into the violist’s trembling-loving-mourning sighs. Within Zoumbas’ plaintive song, I sought a metaphysical space in which to dream – a space of separation-connection-absence-presence – in the hope to lament and to dream together in this hall tonight.

The world premiere, performed Lawrence Power with the Brussels Philharmonic, conducted by Ilan Volkov, is temporarily available on VRT radio here: (beginning around 1’02”)

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnu/luister/radio/k/klarafestival~31-189/klarafestival~31-20706-0

The UK premiere, performed by Lawrence Power with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by John Storgårds, is available online 10 May through 9 June 2023 on BBC Radio 3 here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lkl2

A podcast in which I discuss this work with Kate Molleson is available on Darmstadt On Air:

https://internationales-musikinstitut.de/en/ferienkurse/onair/podcast24/

Alex Ross discusses this work in the New Yorker here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/17/max-richter-music-review

[…] I heard, via an online stream, the world première of Cassandra Miller’s “I cannot love without trembling,” a desolate, radiant concerto for viola and orchestra. Miller, a Canadian composer based in London, has her own affiliations with the complicated lineage of minimalist and ambient music, although she is too idiosyncratic an artist to be slotted into a single category. Her work generally moves at an unhurried pace, employing loops, ostinatos, and other repetitive structures. Yet its progress is as unpredictable as it is methodical. Simple harmonies cloud over, fixed tones melt into glissandos, squalls of noise blow in. A chaotic humanness animates this zone of the minimalist multiverse, with the singing voice front and center.

Miller often immerses herself in found musical objects: a Maria Callas recording, an American Baptist hymn, birdsong. She goes through an obsessive phase of listening to her sources and mimicking them with her voice. She then transfers her impressions to the page, weaving around them a finely varied musical fabric. The title of her new score comes from Simone Weil: “Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.” The melodic material is derived from a haunting handful of recordings made by the Greek American fiddler Alexis Zoumbas in the early twentieth century—documents that, in turn, draw on the age-old lamenting songs of Epirus, in Greece. Miller asks her soloist to study not only the Zoumbas tracks but also her own sung replicas of them.

This fragmented, mediated process yields an experience of bruising immediacy. The concerto’s première took place at the Klarafestival, in Brussels, and is streaming at the Belgian site VRT. Lawrence Power gives a staggering account of the solo part, with Ilan Volkov and the Brussels Philharmonic providing vehement support. As the viola delivers its keening, cawing songs, the orchestra becomes a chamber of resonances and reverberations: the strings quiver in sympathy, the brass cast brooding shadows, a piccolo alights with birdlike chatter. We end where we begin, with a glimmer of harp, but something colossal has transpired.

Other quotations from Weil are inscribed over sections of Miller’s score. One of them reads, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” The piece itself demands such devotional attention, although, given the complex provenance of its sources, it doesn’t pass itself off as a pure, sacred vessel. The atmosphere of lamentation is engulfing—so much so that you could hear the work as one more apocalyptic lullaby for an anxious age. Yet the emotions are too ragged and potent to leave you in a daze of sadness. Shards of memory pierce the illusion of a seamless ritual. Sorrow edges into rage. This is music that reminds us how to cry.