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Cassandra Miller (b.1976)
Swim
Composed: 2023
Premiered: 2023, Victoria
Duration: 17 minutes

“Saturday 6:30 a.m. Swimming.

“At dawn a small mist cool as pearls hangs above the lake. The water is dark and waits in its motionless kingdoms. Bars of light proceed diagonally in front of the swimmer as he moves forward following the motions of the strange white hands. Gold rungs slide past beneath. Red water plants waver up from the bottom in an attitude of plumes. How slow is the slow trance of wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.”

Excerpt from "Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother" by Anne Carson

This is a piece about Robert Schumann, imagining him going for a swim, letting his psyche dissolve there in deep waters, in the repetitive motion of arm-arcs one after the other, left-right, left-right. Swim grew out of a short excerpt of a plaintive brass chorale, found in the fourth movement of Schumann’s Symphony No. 3. It is his “Rhenish” Symphony – however Swim imagines him bathing not in the Rhine (as he did once, almost fatally), but in a cool lake – in a link to the work of Canadian poet Anne Carson. The piece is, all told, as much about Carson as Schumann.

At first, I took each two-chord gesture of the Schumann excerpt and repeated it, in rightleft slowness (and blurred it, as if underwater). Each section of Swim then explores images from Carson’s essay, “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother” (as found in the publication Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, 1995). In Schumann’s original, his chords are imbued with heroic, romantic ideologies, sounding grandiose. In Swim, they take on my own ordinary and resolutely non-heroic feelings about swimming, via Carson’s imagery: dull and vivid colours, quotidian repetition, and cold revery.

Swim is dedicated to my mother, the lake swimmer.

Program note by Cassandra Miller

Cassandra Miller (b.1976)
Swim
Composed: 2023
Premiered: 2023, Victoria
Duration: 17 minutes

“Saturday 6:30 a.m. Swimming.

“At dawn a small mist cool as pearls hangs above the lake. The water is dark and waits in its motionless kingdoms. Bars of light proceed diagonally in front of the swimmer as he moves forward following the motions of the strange white hands. Gold rungs slide past beneath. Red water plants waver up from the bottom in an attitude of plumes. How slow is the slow trance of wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.”

Excerpt from "Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother" by Anne Carson

This is a piece about Robert Schumann, imagining him going for a swim, letting his psyche dissolve there in deep waters, in the repetitive motion of arm-arcs one after the other, left-right, left-right. Swim grew out of a short excerpt of a plaintive brass chorale, found in the fourth movement of Schumann’s Symphony No. 3. It is his “Rhenish” Symphony – however Swim imagines him bathing not in the Rhine (as he did once, almost fatally), but in a cool lake – in a link to the work of Canadian poet Anne Carson. The piece is, all told, as much about Carson as Schumann.

At first, I took each two-chord gesture of the Schumann excerpt and repeated it, in rightleft slowness (and blurred it, as if underwater). Each section of Swim then explores images from Carson’s essay, “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother” (as found in the publication Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, 1995). In Schumann’s original, his chords are imbued with heroic, romantic ideologies, sounding grandiose. In Swim, they take on my own ordinary and resolutely non-heroic feelings about swimming, via Carson’s imagery: dull and vivid colours, quotidian repetition, and cold revery.

Swim is dedicated to my mother, the lake swimmer.

Program note by Cassandra Miller