Born in South London, her father, James Brand Silver, was a violinist and oboist, and had been a boy chorister at St. George's Chapel, Windsor where his singing attracted the attention of Queen Victoria.
An important point in Millicent Silver's career came at the end of the war, when at Dartington Hall she was persuaded by the conductor Hans Oppenheim to play the continuo in a performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas on a harpsichord.
Soon after this her future as a harpsichordist was determined, and the London Harpsichord Ensemble, which she formed with her husband and others, gave its first performance in 1945 at one of Dame Myra Hess's lunch-hour concerts at the National Gallery.
She acquired a Kirckman harpsichord, which had been rebuilt by the instrument maker Henry Tull, and, with the group, toured widely and became a prolific broadcaster for the BBC.
She had a 35-year career on the harpsichord during which she played a very wide solo repertory, though never abandoning the revival-type instruments with pedals, 16' stops and piano-type construction popular in the 1950s and 1960s, though later supplanted by the authentic performance movement.
She played most of the keyboard works of Bach, including his concertos, Partitas and English Suites; the Goldberg Variations featured repeatedly in her recital programmes.
She also played the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Christian Bach, many of Domenico Scarlatti's and Antonio Soler's sonatas, many of the works of François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, the music of the English virginalists (William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, John Bull and others), and much 20th century harpsichord music by composers such as Manuel de Falla, Hans Werner Henze and György Ligeti.