The Music of American Composer Lejaren Hiller and an Examination of His Early Works Involving Technology (review)

Looking back from a technical point of view on computer music from the 1950s, one has the impression that it is ancient history; at the same time, it is surprising how contemporary the ideas from 50 years ago still appear. Descriptions of hardware and software from 50 years ago probably seem like cave drawings to most people today. Although hardware and software developments were significant from the 1950s through the 1980s, for most practitioners of computer music these developments were relatively transparent. The working method and environment of a user sitting in front of a teletype, punching cards, waiting for batch jobs on a large, somewhat non-descript behemoth computer at a university did not change much for the lone "eccentric" from a music department sharing time with scientific researchers (who fortunately were sympathetic to anyone in the arts even vaguely interested in computing).

For most composers of computer music, except for the odd mini- or micro-computer user or the fortunate few to have worked in "elite" research centers, it has only been in the past 15 years or so that hardware and software have gone through a major revolution. Some might argue that this "revolution" is nothing more than a change of working habits, a change on the surface, whereas others would insist that this overhaul in the tools of the trade is directly related to artistic creativity in profound ways. Although this discussion of the tools and technology is engaging, the fact remains that many of the prevalent ideas of the 1950s (independent of hardware and software) remain surprisingly relevant today. David Rosenboom, in his heady forward to James Bohn's The Music of American Composer Lejaren Hiller and an Examination of His Early Works Involving Technology, recaptures some of the intellectual adventurousness of the pioneer era of computer music:

Hiller's contributions to procedural thinking . . . he employed serial techniques and understood them as a subset . . . inside combinatorial mathematics . . . He introduced the idea of the interval row . . . developed a measure of linear angularity . . . dissonance measures . . . weighting schemes for parametric behaviors . . . geometry and topological ideas . . . as descriptors of forms . . . pseudo-random numbers, Monte Carlo–like generate-and-test loops, moving-window filters on stochastic cannons . . . notions of formal and perceptual hierarchy . . . rhythmic hierarchies . . . Markov transition probabilities . . . systems and information theory (pp. vii–x)

Add a couple of popular terms like "chaos theory" and "genetic algorithms" to the mix, and one has a reasonable list of much of today's intellectual fodder.

If only Hiller could have done a computer search of the terms "algorithmic music" and "computer generated music" 50 years ago! The other day, Google returned about 38,000 (in 0.07 seconds) and 51,300 (in 0.11 seconds) hits, respectively, for these terms. What would be different today without his decision to abandon chemistry to pursue a career in music? What is his historical importance, and what are his major contributions to the field of computer music? Any serious study of algorithmic music must begin with Hiller's seminal work Experimental Music, published in 1959. (Iannis Xenakis's Formalized Music from 1963 makes up the other half of seminal publications in the field from that period.)

The most striking thing about Experimental Music are the musical questions that Hiller poses. But where do we go from there? Or even better, where does algorithmic music fit into contemporary computer music society...