Dad Goes to the Mountain for orchestra (2026)

Cassandra Miller

Chapter I: Lightness
Chapter II: Arrested by the Night Sky
Chapter III: Bright Cloud Unknowing
Chapter IV: Completeness

Dad Goes to the Mountain is a single-movement composition in four chapters, for my father. My Dad was a mathematician, theoretical physicist, and expert conversationalist. He inspired his students, his children and grandchildren to feel awe at the smallest and largest mysteries of nature. In his old age, he developed vascular dementia which impacted his spatial awareness and short-term memory, but which left his personality largely intact. I experienced him in this state as someone becoming more and more himself—he could act only from his deepest instincts which were kind and gentle. When I compare photos of him at 70 and at 80, the older ones show a much lighter person. I feel he was somehow transfigured by the experience.

This transfiguration—and lightness—are the topics of this piece. It is about a general upward ascending, about forgetting (un-knowing), and about the fluidity of time. I imagine a mountain as the goal of my Dad’s transformation, as a symbol for the simplicity of spiritual awareness—and, in quite a leap, I pretend that he is greeted on the mountain by a wind band from the Andean heights of Peru. A specific recording became the basis for my composition process: “Canchis Tierra Linda” by the Banda San Martin de Sicuani (from the fantastic label El Volcán, which has recently re-released many archival tracks from rural Peru). I wrote around and through this music—as if making fanciful drawings over it on tracing paper. This musical filigree then took on its own life, growing and ageing and forgetting. Cassandra Miller

for Gary Glenn Miller