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Lejaren Hiller (1924 - 1994) Lejaren Hiller has become legendary as the first person to compose music with a computer. Trained as a chemist, he worked at Dupont before joining the Chemistry Department of the University of Illinois. There, his work with computers led him to experiment with music, leading to the creation of the ILLIAC Suite for string quartet in 1957. So virulent was the hostility of the musical establishment against this scientific poacher in the realms of art that both Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians refused to recognize his existence until just before his death, even though he had become internationally famous and was performed worldwide. As a chemist, Hiller developed the first reliable process for dyeing Orlon and coauthored a popular textbook. But he did not just fall into music in 1957. He played piano, oboe, clarinet, and sax in his youth, and extracted the parts for big-band jazz arrangements as a way of making money in college. He had in fact been composing steadily since his highschool days. His came from an artistic family, his father, Lejaren senior, was a well-known art photographer who specialized in lurid historical tableaux. Hiller was an experimental composer in the strictest sense. In the mid sixties, Hiller asserted that his, "objective in composing music by means of computer programming is not the immediate realization of an aesthetic unity, but the providing and evaluating of techniques whereby this goal can eventually be realized." In this sense Hiller was a forward looking composer, in that each piece was an experiment that lead towards the next piece. Though Hiller is famous for his computer work, he was also the foremost exponent of both sonata form and fugue in his generation. His 1976 Electronic Sonata, for example, is a perfectly orthodox, 45-minute sonata-form movement made entirely of computer-generated and computer-manipulated sounds. While studying chemistry at Princeton, he studied theory and composition with Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions. Hiller received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton in 1947 at the age of 23, after receiving both a B.A. and a M.A. in chemistry from the same institution. He became a member of the chemistry faculty at the University of Illinois in 1952. While teaching chemistry, Hiller also worked towards a M.M. in composition, studying Hubert Kessler. After receiving his M.M. in 1958, he transferred to the music faculty in order to start the Experimental Music Studio. In 1968 Hiller joined the faculty at the University of Buffalo as a professor of composition. Hiller received two Fulbright lectureships, the first of which was in 1973 to 1974 in Warsaw, Poland. The second of these two lectureships was in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, in 1980. Lejaren Hiller passed away on January 26, 1994, in Buffalo after a long bout with Alzheimer's disease.

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