Long before Auto-Tune and deepfake compositions, university professor Lejaren Hiller premiered a concert recital composed by a computer and became an overnight celebrity
https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...s-born-in-1956
Here's a reader's comment (Roboxon):
How intriguing. The Illiac Suite, or at least the excerpt provided above, comes across as an attractively whimsical piece of tonally/modally inflected light modernism, like something Lou Harrison might have tossed off - certainly a long way from the bloops and bleeps that one might have expected. But it was all in the algorithms, I guess. And maybe I shouldn't have been surprised: somewhere I have a CD of Hiller's (personally composed, as I recall) music - a couple of violin sonatas and a piano sonata - that is similarly appealing in an off-kilter way, if I remember correctly. Perhaps I'll try and dig it out, though I fear it's at the bottom of a pile behind several other piles. What a pity that there seems to be no commercially available recording of the Illiac Suite. There is a disc that includes another of his string quartets - No. 6, no less - alongside a "Computer Cantata", which I think I'm going to have to get. Perhaps a Lejaren Hiller revival is overdue?
More broadly, it's interesting what charming music some of those much-derided big beasts of the postwar avantgarde were able to produce - for example, there's an enjoyably neoclassical early violin sonata by Stockhausen (some of whose later music, such as Tierkreis, also has a childlike sweetness); Cage's prepared piano music is generally very winsome, as is Berio's for conventional piano; while even Hiller's mentor Milton Babbitt wrote music much pleasanter than a total serialist had any right to produce - far preferable to Boulez, for example (though perhaps there's some ravishing Boulez that I've missed?).
https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...s-born-in-1956
Here's a reader's comment (Roboxon):
How intriguing. The Illiac Suite, or at least the excerpt provided above, comes across as an attractively whimsical piece of tonally/modally inflected light modernism, like something Lou Harrison might have tossed off - certainly a long way from the bloops and bleeps that one might have expected. But it was all in the algorithms, I guess. And maybe I shouldn't have been surprised: somewhere I have a CD of Hiller's (personally composed, as I recall) music - a couple of violin sonatas and a piano sonata - that is similarly appealing in an off-kilter way, if I remember correctly. Perhaps I'll try and dig it out, though I fear it's at the bottom of a pile behind several other piles. What a pity that there seems to be no commercially available recording of the Illiac Suite. There is a disc that includes another of his string quartets - No. 6, no less - alongside a "Computer Cantata", which I think I'm going to have to get. Perhaps a Lejaren Hiller revival is overdue?
More broadly, it's interesting what charming music some of those much-derided big beasts of the postwar avantgarde were able to produce - for example, there's an enjoyably neoclassical early violin sonata by Stockhausen (some of whose later music, such as Tierkreis, also has a childlike sweetness); Cage's prepared piano music is generally very winsome, as is Berio's for conventional piano; while even Hiller's mentor Milton Babbitt wrote music much pleasanter than a total serialist had any right to produce - far preferable to Boulez, for example (though perhaps there's some ravishing Boulez that I've missed?).
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