Ann McMillan

Ann E. McMillan was born in New York City and grew up in New England, England and Wisconsin. She graduated from Bennington College in 1945, having majored in Composition and French Horn. She helped open the LP program for classical music at RCA Victor Records and in the fifties met Edgard Varèse. She became his student and assisted him on the tape portions of his Deserts. From 1955 to 1957, she worked with a Fulbright Grant in Paris at the Radiodiffusion Television Francaise Studio d'Essai on "Recording Techniques for Music Composition." On return to the States, she worked for their overseas studio in New York, composed a film score for Rhino Safari, a Norwegian documentary, and broadcast radio essays written for CBS's French and English networks. Her pieces deal with human vocal sounds, insect sounds, bird calls, and water sounds, but like all of McMillan's materials, they are altered almost beyond recognition.