Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr.

1924-1994

Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr. was born in New York City in 1924. The son of a painter/photographer and model/actress, he became accustomed to the arts at an early age. Despite the fact that neither parent was very musically inclined, Hiller gravitated towards the family's Duo-art player piano. His parents attempted to formalize his music education by having him take piano lessons from Harvey Brown from 1938 to 1941. At the same time, he had learned to play clarinet and saxophone.

He was admitted to Princeton University in 1941 and decided to major in chemistry. While majoring in chemistry at Princeton, he studied composition with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions, and later recieved a Master's Degree in Music from the University of Illinois. After working for DuPont, and as a faculty member in the chemsitry departement at the University of Illinois, he decided to leave chemistry for music, as he felt that his music would not be taken seriously as long as he was not a "professional" musician.

Hiller is primarily known for his work in computer-assisted composition. His work Quartet No. 4 for Strings, the ILLIAC Suite (co-composed with Leonard M. Isaacson in 1957) was the first piece of music to be written with the aid of a computer. Other significant works in this vein include the Computer Cantata (1963), HPSCHD (co-composed with John Cage in 1968), A Preview of Coming Attractions (1975), Persiflage (1977), and the Algorythms cycle (1968, 1972, and 1984). Over a span of nearly thirty years, Hiller wrote fifteen pieces that involve various degrees of computer-assisted composition.

Hiller is also known as an American pioneer of electronic music. In 1958, he became a member of the music faculty at the University of Illinois, and founded the Experimental Music Studio, which was the second electronic music studio in the United States (the first being formed at Columbia University in 1952). There he taught one of the first courses in electronic music, which was called ÒSeminar in Musical AcousticsÓ in order to disguise its avant-garde nature.

Hiller served as director of EMS until he left the University of Illinois in 1968 to accept a position at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He became director of Buffalo's Experimental Studio in 1974. He also worked at the Studio Eksperimentalne of Polskie Radio in 1973-1974, during his Fulbright lectureship in Warsaw, Poland. He wrote some twenty pieces of electronic music, including such works as Time of the Heathen Suite (1961), Machine Music (1964), Suite for Two Pianos and Tape (1966), Electronic Sonata (1976), and Expo '85 (co-composed with Charles Ames and John Myhill).

Hiller began to suffer from dementia around 1984. After completing Expo '85, his last piece of electronic/computer music, he composed his last four works (The Fox Trots Again, Metaphors for Guitar Quartet, Symphony #3, and John Italus: a one-act Melodrama). He died in 1994 from a stroke caused by Alzhiemer's disease. In the course of his career, Hiller wrote some seventy-three compositions, including works for theatre, film, and television.