Let it Sing!

Unearthly music from the Environment and Sound Mobile drifted in through the windows of the Mills College Music Building where the old man sat, brittle and aching in his wheelchair. Outside, on a balcony, a college girl dressed in death-wish black and a free-form welder's helmet slithered through snail and snake dances, while on another balcony, a pallid redhead paused in her dance every now and then to tug the string that let a plastic moon pop up from the bushes below. In the branches of a tree on the campus, a girl in red softly sipped from a white teacup that trailed a blue silk ribbon down through the leaves. Painted Coke bottles and sculpture that looked like tiny traffic accidents bloomed in the grass like crocuses.

Togetherness. Such Happenings set just the right tone for a festival honoring the 70th year of Darius Milhaud, and when Composer Milhaud turned up in the Mills Concert Hall, he had a Happening of his own ready to fit the occasion. The hall was aswim with students, colleagues and devotees as Milhaud conducted the first performance of the 401st composition of his long career--a Suite de Quatrains for seven instruments and the speaking voice of his wife Madeleine. To the delight of the admiring audience, the Suite turned out to be a "chance" work, in which all seven players were free to find their own tempos and moods while Milhaud sat by in his wheelchair to draw them into occasional togetherness with a stiff little sweep of his baton.

In a weekend of musical homage that amounted to a Milhaud retrospective (with performances of his Caramel Mou: Shimmy for Jazz Band and Singer, a string quartet, a ballet, 'Adame Miroir, and his one-act opera Medea), local critics rejoiced in "the new turn" Milhaud's futuristic Suite suggested. But to Milhaud himself the new turn was only a pleasant reminiscence of work he did 40 years ago. "Now that everyone else is doing these things," he said cheerlessly, "they think I am following their steps. That is part of the general misunderstanding a composer faces all his life."

Form's Conscience. Since nothing heftier than a lingering lyricism is common to his varied compositions, Milhaud has been particularly vulnerable to misunderstanding--or simple dislike--all his life. In his days with the Groupe des Six in Paris, he expanded music's language with his studies of polytonality, meter and counterpoint, but he also wrote music that was crippled by flat jokes, banalities and topical trivia. He has written music for text by the Catholic laureate Paul Claudel--and also a Bar Mitzvah cantata for Israel's 13th birthday. With 15 operas, 12 symphonies, 25 film scores, 15 ballets, 35 concertos and 18 string quartets (he stopped when he had written more than Beethoven) behind him, his message is still unclear; in works heavy with both aphorism and enigma, his music ranges from the insufferably bizarre to the ineffably beautiful.

When Milhaud came to Mills in 1940, the laissez-faire intellectuality that made him a troublesome composer marked him immediately as a superb teacher. With an interest that spans every voice of music, from Hebraic folk songs to Bach to jazz, Milhaud never corrals a student's creativity, but merely stands by as music's advocate--and form's conscience.

"I only demand that my students work regularly and well," he says. "I don't interfere with the form they wish to pursue, but I remind them that if they wish to build a tall house, for example, they must not forget to put in the staircase." The hundreds of students who have passed through his courses in composition invariably find themselves enriched by the experience. "Whenever I got bogged down," says one, "he'd just say, 'Let it sing!' "

Don't Argue. Almost immobilized by gout, rheumatism and arthritis, Milhaud teaches in his home, and his own composition is inhibited only by the pain that stops his hand from writing. "I have gotten worse in the past 30 years," he says furiously. "And in this past year, the arthritis has stopped me far too much for my tastes." Still, in his 23 years at Mills he has composed 91 works, and since 1947 he has divided his time between Oakland and Paris, where he teaches composition at the Paris Conservatory.

His face is grey and his hands are speckled with age now. Heavy, stoop-shouldered, protected even from springtime by his muffler, he is a grandly Churchillian figure on the campus. His music is still spiced with youth and so are his interests: Jazz Pianist Dave Brubeck built such a deep rapport with him that he named his son Darius, and Milhaud occasionally shocks prissy listeners by saying that good jazz can steal his attention from dull classics any time. His youthful spirit echoes especially in his lively Provencal wit. Hoping to end an argument with him, a student once pleaded, "Doesn't music all boil down to a matter of taste?" "But of course," said Milhaud. "You have poor taste."

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