Maggi Payne

Maggi Payne (b. 1945, Temple, Texas, raised in Amarillo) began on flute at nine and was given a Webcor reel-to-reel by her father, a doctor with a taste for gadgets, at ten — an early pairing of music and machine she never really left. She took a B.Mus. in flute at Northwestern before an M.Mus. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studied with Gordon Mumma, Ben Johnston, and Salvatore Martirano and crossed paths with computer-music pioneers Lejaren Hiller and Herbert Brün — along with a single, much-remembered lunch conversation with John Cage. She moved to Mills College in 1970 for its newly established electronic music program, earning an MFA under Robert Ashley’s mentorship. Joining the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music in 1972 and co-directing it from 1992 to 2018, she taught recording engineering, composition, and electronic music for more than fifty years, working across tape, synthesis, and video in her own compositions — early pieces such as Hum (1973) explored spatialization across multiple microphones, while later ones like Crystal (1986) paired sound with her own photomicrography of crystal growth and NASA solar-wind data. She contributed electric flute to David Behrman’s segment of Ashley’s documentary Music with Roots in the Aether (1976) and to his album On the Other Ocean (1977), and shared the Mills faculty for years with Terry Riley and synthesizer designer Don Buchla. From the 1980s she collaborated with video artist Ed Tannenbaum on his Technological Feets live dance/video works, and built a flame speaker at San Francisco’s Exploratorium with Nick Bertoni (1983–85).