2016 Molleson, Kate, katemolleson.com – A Large House 

“Strings of the Oslo Philharmonic in surround sound formation playing intense downwards slides for 30-odd minutes. The effect was like sinking deeper and deeper — and deeper and deeper and deeper — into a huge warm bath of thick liquid, possibly like the scenes in Jonathan Glazer’s film Under the Skin when Scarlett Johansson’s alien character lures nice men into the mercury death pool, but much more benign. In any case it’s a really striking piece. Miller is a Canadian composer currently living in Huddersfield and a generally intelligent and unpretentious and imaginative voice in contemporary music.”

2015 Hammond, Matthew, TEMPO – Duet for Cello and Orchestra

“With the music in the hands of such a sympathetic conductor as Volkov, I would have liked to see the composers experiment more. By contrast, Cassandra Miller’s Duet for cello and orchestra, while not being much riskier in terms of the demands it made on its performers, did create a much more individual sound-world: inverting the typical soloist-to-orchestra relationship, cellist Charles Curtis spent almost the whole piece playing alternating open G and D strings while the orchestra wove elaborate transcriptions of a folk song around him. The quality of the orchestral writing was astonishing, and the beautiful piece an unexpected highlight of the festival.”

2015 Molleson, Kate, The Guardian – Duet for Cello and Orchestra

“Cassandra Miller’s Duet for Cello and Orchestra is arresting”

2014 Weeks, James, TEMPO / Volume 68 / Issue 269 / July 2014

Feature article: Along the grain: the music of Cassandra Miller

“Performing Miller’s music one is aware of how attuned she is to the grain of music’s constituent elements, to their natural way of being or growing: to the grain of pitch, which is the harmonic series; to the grain of rhythm, which is pulse; to the grain of each instrument and voice, which is their open, tensionless sounding; to the grain of expression, which is giving; to the grain of time, which is endless continuation; to the grain of energy, which is entropy. These she works along or cuts across more or less obliquely to create the tensions that support the music. One might almost say that, as much as any composer working today, these grains are her materials: the complexity and richness of her finest work reacquaints us with these fundamentals in a way that does indeed allow us to hear and feel in new ways.”

2013 Woolfe, Zachary, New York Times

“Finding music is as much a matter of taking cues from others as stumbling upon things on your own. On his blog, Alex Ross, the New Yorker critic, pointed me toward the work of the Canadian composer Cassandra Miller. He, in turn, got the tip from the blogger Tim Rutherford-Johnson. Ms. Miller puts a generous helping of her sweet, slightly surreal music on her own blog; I particularly like her radical compression of music from Monteverdi’s Orfeo, scored for chamber ensemble and assorted children’s toys.”

2013 Ross, Alex. therestisnoise.com, New York – Philip the wanderer

“an absolutely fascinating piano piece”

2013 Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. The Rambler, London, UK – Guide

“The way it was built out of layers and loops meant that something of the music’s origins, in a recorded artifact, was carried through into the form of the piece; this was an echo of a recording given the post-production treatment… it was more than the aura of vinyl or tape, but of a tape that was loosely wound, or even unspooling. Hesitantly, I might even say it was organic. But still with that sense of inter-media translation about it, the sense of something artificial, brought into a dialogue. Like I say, a really, really good piece.”

2013 Tresham, Scott. blog post, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Montreal

“One of Canada’s most fascinating young composers”

2013 Gottschalk, Jennifer. Sound Expanse, Boston – Warblework

“beautiful and compelling”

2013 Gottschalk, Jennifer. Sound Expanse, Boston – Philip the wanderer

“…one of many examples of a risk, or a departure from expectation that is possible when a composer works closely, and genuinely as a peer, with performers.”

2013 Gottschalk, Jennifer. Sound Expanse, Boston – for mira

“a vibrant and joyful experience”

2012 Simas, Richard. Musicworks, Toronto

Feature article: Cassandra Miller’s unclassifiable concert music

“There is an uncanny immediacy to [Miller’s work] that makes her a singular bright light in the Canadian new-music firmament.”

“By balancing complex sensations with a direct – not simple – approach, and by adding whimsy and insistence to seemingly basic sound materials often oddly turned, Miller’s music resounds with suggestions of experience… This adds a bitter-sweetness to her music, like the wryness of Samuel Beckett in combination with the whimsy of Italo Calvino.”

2011 Mulder, Dolf. Vital Weekly, USA – This one and that one side by side

“a very poetic and intimate piece”

2010 Poole, Elissa. The Globe and Mail, Toronto – Concerto for violin and 

blindfolded ensemble

“But of all the pieces, Miller’s blindfolded concerto thought hardest about convention per se, in ‘musical’ material, in interpretation and in our modern-day concert-going lives.”

2009 Choate, Andrew. Facsimile Magazine, USA – A Large House

“…conductor Peter Rundel did an outstanding job leading the Janáček Philharmonic through the world premiere of Canadian Cassandra Miller’s ‘A Large House’ (2009), a dense, hypnotic piece for string orchestra. This was an incredible aural experience… my ears had been so fully transported that, when the piece ended, the acoustics felt so different that my ears had to pop and readjust; the perception was as if they had undergone a change of elevation.”

2008 Fujino, David. Common Chords; Live Music Report, Toronto – Goose Food

“The orchestrated deliquescence and pulling apart of sounds were truly arresting and mightily impressive.”

1999 Lloyd Dykk, The Vancouver Sun – Margaret Bay

“The new work on the program was the 22 year-old Victoria composer Cassandra Miller’s Margaret Bay, named after a part of Vancouver Island … A delicate, contemplative piece from beginning to end, it involved leviathan-like glissandos from the cellos and basses, light percussion, and literally glassy effects, including, aside from violin harmonics, the sound of rubbing the rims of four of Miller’s mother’s wine-glasses. Surprise of surprises, a conservative audience seemed to like it.”