Lejaren Hiller

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Lejaren Hiller holds a specific and historically unrepeatable position in the history of music: he was, with Leonard Isaacson, the composer of the Illiac Suite (1957), the first piece of music composed with the assistance of a computer. The work was generated by the ILLIAC I mainframe at the University of Illinois using a program Hiller and Isaacson devised to apply rule-based compositional processes - species counterpoint, twelve-tone procedures, stochastic methods - to the generation of musical material. The result was not a curiosity but a serious compositional document, and it opened a research programme that Hiller pursued for decades, at Illinois and later at SUNY Buffalo, where he collaborated with John Cage on HPSCHD (1969), a massive multimedia event involving seven harpsichords and fifty-one tape machines.

Machine Music For Piano, Percussion And Tape, the centrepiece of this Turnabout LP, is a key document of Hiller's practice: algorithmic process made audible, the machine and the performer in a relationship that neither simply commands nor simply serves. A composer whose historical significance has never quite translated into the attention his work deserves as music.