What’s next for Mills College’s music department?
Oakland private school has had a big impact on Bay Area, national scenes
For nearly a century, the future of music arrived first at Mills College.
The recent announcement that the private Oakland university plans to cease functioning as a degree-granting college in 2023 and will no longer admit students after the fall has sparked widespread dismay. Hundreds of Mills alumni quickly started organizing to convince the school’s board of trustees to reverse the decision, which would deplete the nation’s dwindling ranks of some three dozen all-women undergraduate institutions.
The loss of the Mills coed music school, however, has far wider implications. Despite its diminutive size, the graduate program has played a central role in the evolution of contemporary composition and musical practice. If the program’s disproportionate influence has waned in the 21st century it’s because concepts developed at Mills have moved from the margins to the mainstream over the generations.
“It’s hard to think of any place in the world that has had more influence on new music,” wrote pianist Sarah Cahill in an email. As a musician specializing in 20thand 21st-century music, she’s performed at Mills numerous times over the years, often interpreting pieces by composers who taught there.
“Mills College encapsulates the history of 20thcentury music,” she wrote, “with faculty including Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Anthony Braxton, Luciano Berio, Darius Milhaud, Roscoe Mitchell, Robert Ashley, and many more.”
The news from Mills comes on the heels of the ongoing implosion of the San Francisco Art Institute, which has shaped culture in the Bay Area and far beyond since the 19th century. Already struggling with years of declining enrollment and budget deficits, both schools were dealt a body blow by the pandemic. But where the San Francisco Art Institute is a shell of its former glory, the Mills music department has maintained its vaunted status.
“Mills has always been right there at the cutting edge of what was happening,” said composer Steed Cowart, who’s been on the faculty at Mills for more than three decades.
“Most college music departments are more like museums, focusing on music of the past. That’s changed a bit, but it’s still largely the case. You can’t ignore the history, but at Mills we’re not so immersed in the past that we don’t live in the present and look into the future, which I think is a much healthier situation.”
Mills is particularly associated with the intersection of technology and music, a connection forged in 1966 when the San Francisco Tape Music Center moved to the campus (where it was rechristened the Center for Contemporary Music). Founded five years earlier by Pauline Oliveros and former Mills music students Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender, the CCM earned international renown as a bustling laboratory for pioneering work in electroacoustic and computer music, performance art, interactive installations, sound art and sound synthesis.
Upon finishing her bachelor’s degree at Oberlin Conservatory in the mid-1980s, Amy X Neuburg was looking for a graduate program focusing on 20th-century music. A budding composer with an interest in electronics, she wanted a program “that nurtured the ideals of the avant-garde composers,” she said. “Mills was a name that kept coming up in all my textbooks.”
Moving to Oakland in 1986, she found a department where composers like Maggi Payne, Larry Polansky and David Rosenbloom encouraged students to explore new ways of creating, shaping and employing sound. Rather than a conservatory where students sequestered themselves in studios day and night, Mills fostered a hands-on approach to sound-generating equipment and a milieu of intellectual cross pollination and multimedia collaboration.
Mills prepared Neuburg for her creatively fecund career, composing intricate song cycles and performing them via looped vocals and percussion-triggered samples. Her co-conspirators are largely drawn from the ranks of Mills alumni, like Joel Davel, Thea Farhadian, Herb Heinz, Anne Hege and Gino Robair.
The Bay Area new music scene is studded with similar overlapping and interconnected networks of Mills alumni and faculty. “You come out of Mills and there’s your community right there,” Neuburg said. “It’s one of the last vestiges of the open-minded spirit of the Bay Area. We have the San Francisco Conservatory, which has shown a lot of creativity of late with things like the Switchboard Festival, but it’s not Mills.”
The history of music at Mills tracks closely with the evolution of experimental music in the United States, starting with composer Henry Cowell working closely with the dance department in the 1930s. More than embracing of technology, the avant-garde manifested at Mills via a welcoming stance toward people, ideas and traditions not found in other academic music settings.
Lou Harrison, a student of Cowell’s, brought a Pacific Rim sensibility to the program with his love of Indonesian gamelan during his intermittent stints on the faculty from the mid1930s through the mid-’80s. But the school’s key midcentury hire was Darius Milhaud, a jazz-loving French Jew who found refuge at the school after fleeing the German occupation.
Among Milhaud’s many illustrious students was an ambitious young composer and pianist named Dave Brubeck, who attended Mills on the GI Bill. It would be several decades before African American composers associated with jazz became a regular presence at the school, but since the 1980s Mills has cultivated deep ties with a succession of brilliant artists forged by Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, including Anthony Braxton, George Lewis and Roscoe Mitchell.
With Mitchell’s 2019 retirement Mills quickly hired a third-generation AACM star, 43-year-old cellist Tomeka Reid, making her the latest member of the Chicago collective to hold the Darius Milhaud Chair in Music Composition. Whether she’ll get a chance to establish a postpandemic presence on campus is unclear, but so is just about everything else surrounding the future of Mills.
Mills officials said the plan is for the college to become an institute, but provided no details about what that would mean. With hundreds of scores, thousands of recordings, vintage electronic instruments and other historical treasures, the music department’s physical legacy demands real thought and resources.
“I’m terrified to think what might happen to the archives,” said Cowart. “I would like it if some major institution, the Smithsonian or UC Berkeley, stepped in. There’s this vast resource there, at least 50 years of recordings. It’s very costly to maintain. Reel-to-reel tapes deteriorate. I don’t know if they understand what they have there.”