''Illiac Suite'' (later retitled String Quartet No. 4)
[Andrew Stiller, "Hiller, Lejaren (Arthur)", ''Grove Music Online'' (reviewed December 3, 2010; accessed December 14, 2014).] is a 1957 composition for
string quartet which is generally agreed to be the first score composed by an
electronic
Electronic may refer to:
*Electronics, the science of how to control electric energy in semiconductor
* ''Electronics'' (magazine), a defunct American trade journal
*Electronic storage, the storage of data using an electronic device
*Electronic co ...
computer.
[Denis L. Baggi,]
The Role of Computer Technology in Music and Musicology
", ''lim.dico.unimi.it'' (December 9, 1998). Lejaren Hiller, in collaboration with
Leonard Isaacson, programmed the
ILLIAC I
The ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer), a pioneering computer in the ILLIAC series of computers built in 1952 by the University of Illinois, was the first computer built and owned entirely by a United States educational institution.
Compute ...
computer at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...
(where both composers were professors) to generate compositional material for his String Quartet No. 4.
The piece consists of four movements, corresponding to four experiments: the first is about the generation of ''
cantus firmi'', the second generates four-
voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound producti ...
segments with various rules, the third deals with
rhythm
Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular re ...
,
dynamics and playing instructions, and the fourth with various models and probabilities for
generative grammar
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguisti ...
s or
Markov chains (see
stochastic music).
[Lejaren A. Hiller and Leonard M. Isaacson, ]
Experimental Music: Composition With an Electronic Computer
', second edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959): 5–7. Reprinted, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. .
References
External links
* December 4, 2011. See also
2/43/4
an
4/4
*
*
*
{{Computer music
Compositions for string quartet
Computer music compositions
Suites (music)