Lejaren Hiller
Lejaren Arthur Hiller Jr. was an American composer.
Career
His father, Lejaren Hiller, Sr., was a well-known art photographer who specialized in historical tableaux. As a child he played piano, oboe, clarinet, and saxophone. While earning a degree in chemistry at Princeton University, he also studied composition with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. From 1947 to 1952 he worked as a research chemist for DuPont in Waynesboro, Virginia, where he developed the first reliable process for dyeing Orlon and coauthored a popular textbook.In 1957 he collaborated with Leonard Isaacson on his String Quartet No. 4, Illiac Suite, the first significant use of a computer to compose music. He wrote an article on the Illiac Suite for Scientific American which garnered a lot of attention from the press, generating a storm of controversy. The musical establishment was so hostile to this interloper scientist that both Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians refused to include him until shortly before his death.
A majority of Hiller's works after 1957 do not involve computers at all, but might include stochastic music, indeterminacy, serialism, Brahmsian traditionalism, jazz, performance art, folksong and counterpoint mixed together. In 1958 Hiller founded the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He created the MUSICOMP programming language for music composition with Robert Baker in order to create their Computer Cantata. He also collaborated with John Cage for HPSCHD.
In 1968, he joined the faculty at the University at Buffalo as Slee Professor of Composition, where he established the school's first computer music facility and co-directed with Lukas Foss at the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts. Illness forced him to retire in 1989.
His notable pupils include composers James Fulkerson, Larry Lake, Ilza Nogueira, David Rosenboom, Margaret Scoville, Michael Ranta, Elliott Sharp, Bernadette Speach and James Tenney.