Jonathan Mills (composer)

Sir Jonathan Mills AO (born 21 March 1963) is an Australian composer and festival director. He was born and raised in Sydney and has dual Australian and UK citizenship. His work includes two operas, an oratorio, a ballet, song cycles, concertos, and chamber music. He has directed a number of arts festivals in Australia, and from 2006 to 2014 he was Director of the Edinburgh International Festival.

Jonathan Edward Harland Mills was born in Sydney on 21 March 1963. He has Scottish roots, his maternal grandfather having been a Scot from Partick, and he has dual Australian and British citizenship. His father Frank Harland Mills AO is a heart surgeon.

He gained a Bachelor of Music in Composition from the University of Sydney in 1984, where he was associated with St Paul's College. He studied under Peter Sculthorpe.

Mills was a Research Fellow and Composer in Residence at RMIT University, Melbourne between 1992 and 1997. He graduated as Master of Architecture at RMIT in 1999, focusing on acoustic design and the role of sound in the built environment. Between 1998 and 2003 he was an Adjunct Professor at RMIT.

Between 1988 and 2003 he was the artistic director of music festivals in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. These included the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Melbourne Federation Festival, the Melbourne Millennium Eve Celebrations, and the Brisbane Biennial International Music Festival (inaugural Artistic Adviser 1995–97).

It was during these years that he composed Four First Songs, a song cycle for radio on poems by Martin Harrison, and the ballet The Ethereal Eye, which focussed on the architects who designed and built Canberra as the new capital of Australia. In 1999 came his first chamber opera, The Ghost Wife, to a libretto by Dorothy Porter based on the short story The Chosen Vessel by Barbara Baynton, set in the Australian bush at the beginning of the twentieth century. The opera was premiered at the 1999 Melbourne Festival and had numerous productions in other capitals. It had its London premiere at the Barbican Theatre in November 2002, staged by OzOpera, under conductor Richard Gill. This was believed to be the first Australian opera with an Australian cast to have a London season.

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