Mills College Music Department to Stage MUSIC IN THE FAULT ZONE

The Mills College Music Department and Center for Contemporary Music presents Music in the Fault Zone: Experimental Music at Mills College (1939 to the present) a four-day festival, April 21-24, 2022, celebrating its extraordinary musical legacy. It brings together musical luminaries from Mills's past, present, and future during four days of concerts featuring music by Darius Milhaud, Lou Harrison, John Cage, Anthony Braxton, Robert Ashley, Terry Riley, Steed Cowart, and Henry Cowell.

Music in the Fault Zone: Experimental Music at Mills College (1939 to the present) presents former and present Mills faculty and talented Mills alumnae/ni, including: Morton Subotnik, Chris Brown, Alvin Curran, Zeena Parkins, Laetitia Sonami, David Rosenboom, John Bischoff, David Behrman, Annea Lockwood, Ione, Joëlle Léandre, Fred Frith, James Fei, William Winant, Larry Polansky, Roscoe Mitchell, Daniel Schmidt, Maggi Payne and Paul DeMarinis.

The four day festival features 4 pm and 8 pm concerts each day April 21-24. The festival takes place in the beautiful, historic Music Building's Littlefield Concert Hall and Lisser Hall on the lush Mills College Campus grounds in Oakland, California.

Since the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and John Cage taught at Mills, composers have made path-breaking contributions to the development of experimental music. The French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) started teaching at Mills in the fall of 1940. Like Cage, Milhaud composed music for ensembles of percussion instruments and also had a reputation as a musical agent provocateur. The musical radicalism that took root at Mills during this early period has evolved in many directions. Composers at Mills have played leading roles in the founding of musical minimalism; are advocates for the fusion of Western and Eastern musical traditions; and have incorporated cross-cultural influences from Java, India, Cuba, Mexico, and the Philippines into their compositions; their works and performance practices have crossed borders between rock and experimental music; they are free jazz pioneers; and on the cutting edge of new developments in contemporary music which explore relationships between written composition and improvisation.

In the fall of 1966 the San Francisco Tape Music Center moved to Mills and later became the Center for Contemporary Music, which placed Mills at the cutting-edge of experimental music. Composers in the Mills Music Department have developed electronic music fusing visual, theatrical as well as musical elements. They have created multimedia works with sound and light. Mills composers have played leading roles in the development of computer music; created a new genre of experimental opera-for-television; designed new forms of live electronic music and interactive works with acoustic instruments and electronic media. They have devised musical artificial intelligence systems and computer music networks, explored musical interactivity on the Internet, and have challenged traditional distinctions between written composition and improvisation.

In-Person capacity is limited.Tickets: General Admission $15 -or- Pay What You Wish; Free with a Mills I.D. Registration is required. Please visit the Mills College COVID-19 Response Plan for up-to-date policies. Concerts are also available to view by live stream: Free -or- Pay What You Wish. The live stream link will be provided on the day of the event. General admission tickets are $15 -or- Pay What You Wish; Free with a Mills I.D. For a full concert schedule, click here.

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