“On the evening of 9 August 1956, a couple of hundred people squeezed into a student union lounge for a concert recital at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, about 130 miles outside Chicago. Student performances didn’t usually attract so many people, but this was an exceptional case, the debut of the Illiac Suite: String Quartet No 4, that a member of the chemistry faculty, Lejaren Hiller Jr, had devised with the school’s one and only computer, the Illiac I.”
“Decades before today’s artificial intelligence pop stars, Auto-Tune and deepfake compositions was Hiller’s piece, described by the New York Times in his 1994 obituary as ‘the first substantial piece of music composed on a computer’ – and indeed by a computer.”’
“Hiller, the man primarily responsible for the Illiac Suite, became an overnight celebrity, appearing in Time magazine and Newsweek. ‘I went from total obscurity as a composer to really being on the front page of newspapers all over the country,’ he told an interviewer in 1983. ‘One week I was nobody, and the next week I was notorious.’ Biographer James Matthew Bohn recalls stories of Hiller’s phone ‘ringing almost off the hook’ in the aftermath of the performance. ‘He was very famous for 15 minutes,’ Bohn says.”’
“The Illiac Suite stands today as a monument to a certain postwar epoch, one where structuralist philosophies could be wed with digital technology and rule-based, mathematical songwriting techniques that date back as far as ancient Greece. “It’s a landmark piece in the development of the use of algorithmic thinking in music, which is now everywhere,” says Rosenboom. ‘Do I put it on and listen to it as dinner music? Not necessarily. But I think it was a very important experience in thinking about the musical form, and what that form can tell us and not tell us.’ Bruce is more succinct: ‘I love the piece,’ he says. ‘I think it’s fantastic.”’
