2/4/2020 Miller, Phillip

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Miller, Phillip
SA Composers / Miller, Phillip

 
Philip Miller is a South African composer and music producer who specializes in composing music and sound
for lm, video and live performance.
Miller has worked with some of the most innovative lmmakers to emerge from South Africa in recent years,
composing music to the soundtracks to many local and international lms and television productions,
including the acclaimed and award –winning drama TV series Yizo Yizo, set in the ghetto schools of Soweto,
Johannesburg, directed by Oscar nominee, Angus Gibson and Teboho Mahlatsi. In 2004, Miller completed the
soundtracks to three new South African feature lms – they include:  Ian Gabriel’s Forgiveness, Teddy
Mattera’s Max and Mona and Revel Fox’s The Flyer which have been shown at many international lm festivals,
including The London International Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival and Fespaco. This year, Miller
hascompleted the soundtrack to the lm Radio Freedom directed by Philip Noyce for release by Working Title
Films – later this year.
Miller has worked with a wide range of video artists in South Africa, including William Kentridge, Jo Ractli e,
Georgia Papageorge and Clive Van den Berg. In particular, he has collaborated extensively with the
internationally acclaimed artist, William Kentridge composing soundtracks to many of his animation lms,
which have been exhibited all over the world,
including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, in New York, and the Serpentine Gallery
and Tate Modern in London. Some of the lms, Miller has worked on, are: Felix in Exile(1994), Weighing and
Wanting (1996), Stereoscope (1999), Medicine Chest (2000),  and Journey to the Moon (2003). After over a
decade of collaboration with William Kentridge, Miller has also recently returned from a tour of the exhibition
of these lms for huge, outdoor screen projection with his live music performed in concert at the Barbican
Centre, London as well as Central Park, and The  Celebrate Brooklyn Festival in New York.
In 2005, Miller, was commissioned to compose music for Kentridge’s multimedia installation Black Box/
Chambre Noir for the Guggenheim Museum, Berlin.
His album production work in South Africa has been extensive. Miller has produced and arranged music for
many albums including the soundtrack albums to Yizo Yizo 2 and 3, Gazlam, and Steps  for the Future.
In 2003, working with a variety of di erent singers and musicians from di erent regions in South Africa, Miller
produced an album of traditional South African lullabies, The Thula Project. The songs arranged for this
album, involved extensive research and interviews in sound archives and were chosen through a process of 
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2/4/2020 Miller, Phillip

interviews with di erent singers who had been taught these songs by parents and grand parents, continuing
this oral tradition of lullaby- singing.
Miller has also developed a special interest in the use of digital technology, combining sampling and electronic
sounds with live acoustic performance in his compositions.
He has created soundscapes for a series of video and multi-media installations including the exhibition Blank-
-: architecture, apartheid and after curated by Hilton Judin, commissioned for the Architectural Institute of
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Netherlands (NAI), in Rotterdam (1999) as well as Re guring the Archive, (1998) curated by Jane Taylor and 
Carolyn Hamilton for University of Witswatersrand, Johannesburg.
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