The Autumn Festival has launched a portrait of Canadian composer Cassandra Miller, featuring three concerts dedicated to her music. The festival's program includes The Songs of Cassandra Miller, a collection exploring themes of tenderness and fragility, and Gorde by Florentin Ginot and Katharina Ernst, which takes a more physical and earthy approach to music. In an interview with Laurent Feneyrou, Cassandra Miller discusses her fascination with melody, noting that she became interested in it without realizing it at first. The program features works where the voices of Juliet Fraser, Cassandra Miller herself, and the instrumentalists play a central role, inviting the audience to listen with empathy and emotional engagement. One of the pieces, Thanksong (2020), echoes the Thanksgiving Song of a Convalescent to the Divinity, the title of the third movement of Beethoven's fifteenth string quartet. The music is low voltage, performed by musicians from L'Instant donné, whose repetitive bowing on the strings is guided by the composer's singing heard through headphones. Soprano Juliet Fraser sings Beethoven's line slowly and gently, described as a "gentle attention to the other." Another work, Traveler Song, for seven instruments and magnetic tape, draws its material from a Sicilian cart driver's song. The composition, revised in 2019, involves "embodied technique" by Cassandra Miller, who describes herself as "a body that participates." She recorded and layered versions of her voice singing above the original heard through headphones. The work's tone shifts towards a lament, described by Miller as "almost shamanic melody," as the instruments restate and enrich the hum of the voice. Miller emphasizes that the work is created with the performers and realized on stage by them. Gorde, given its world premiere in the second part of the concert, continues the reflection on song and memory through a different device. It is a four-hand piece conceived by Florentin Ginot and Katharina Ernst, featuring multimedia elements where the lights and colorful atmospheres of Theresa Baumgartner create unexpected perspectives. This is the first public encounter between Ginot and Ernst, with the latter's drum kit surrounded by synthesizers, samplers, and other accessories. The first part of Gorde features a soundscape where the double bass shapes and distorts its figures under the eruptive salvos of the drums. The second part highlights Katharina Ernst's virtuosic capabilities on her prepared drum kit, showcasing her skills in polymetric and asymmetric structures. The material is based on a collection of rhythmless Galician songs called alalás, whose harmonic-melodic profile emerges under the solo bowing of the double bassist. The performance concludes with the fusion of timbres and the energy of the "pulse," sealing the meeting of two artists in the momentum of improvisation. Other works by Cassandra Miller will be heard alongside the music of Éliane Radigue and Sarah Davachi on December 14, while Dad Goes to the Mountain for orchestra by the Canadian composer will complete the portrait on October 16th at the Maison de la Radio et de la Musique.