Named after the computer that created it, the Illiac Suite was a revolutionary piece in the history of music as the first piece of music to be generated by a computer.
Lejaren Hiller – A creator of the Illiac Suite
Lejaren Hiller was born in New York City on February 23, 1924, and had an early interest in music, learning how to play the piano, oboe, clarinet, and saxophone as a child. In high school, he even already knew how to write orchestral music. Throughout his academic career, Hiller maintained his love for music and composition while pursuing the sciences simultaneously. Hiller attended Princeton University to study Chemistry in 1941 and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1947. During his time at Princeton, he also studied musical composition with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, both accomplished composers in a wide variety of musical genres including orchestral music and more experimental genres.
Hiller’s professional career was filled with work in both music and chemistry. After obtaining his Ph.D., he landed a job at DuPont (largest chemicals company that created products like Styrofoam, Kevlar, etc) where he worked for 5 years as a research scientist. While there, he continued composing, even finding the effort to run a small concert series. In 1952, Hiller began teaching chemistry at the University of Illinois. While there, he worked towards an M.M. (Master of Music) in composition. This series of events set Hiller up to use the ILLIAC I for the composition of the Illiac Suite in 1956 with Leonard Isaacson, which was a pivotal point in his musical career.
Later on in his life, Hiller would diverge from Chemistry to further his work in computer music, creating more experimental works such as Computer Cantata (1963), Algorithms I-III (1968-72), etc. He would go on to help found the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Illinois and would go on to teach composition at the State University of New York.
Hiller’s life was overall very vivid, with him able to find the connections between the scientific method of chemistry and applying that to methodically creating music. Hiller developed encephalitis in 1987 and passed away in 1994. Hiller mentored many throughout his career and his revolutionary work like the MUSICOMP coding language inspired many generations after him to pursue musical composition.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign-Birthplace of the Illiac Suite
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was founded in 1867 and is the start of the University of Illinois system. In 1952, the ILLIAC I (Illinois Automatic Computer) was built by the University of Illinois, the first computer built and owned by a US educational institution. This is where Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Issacson lead the programming of the ILLIAC I to create String Quartet #4, aka the Iliac Suite. Now a little bit more about the creation of the ILLIAC I. The original architecture for the computer was extracted from a report from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The University of Illinois actually built two computers at the same time, but the ILLIAC I’s cousin, the ORDVAC, was delivered to the US Army in exchange for funding for the ILLIAC with the same design. The ILLIAC I was extremely bulky, with 2800 vacuum tubes and weighing around 5 tons. Besides being used to create computer music, this computer was also used to calculate orbital trajectories and was retired when the ILLIAC II was created in 1963. The University would go on to create 5 more ILLIAC computers, with the Trusted ILLIAC completed in 2006.
ILLIAC I
Today, the university serves as a premier research university, with the library system being the second largest in the US and having the fastest supercomputer of all university campuses. The university includes 30 Nobel laureates, 27 Pulitzer Prize Winners, 2 Turing Award winners, and 1 Fields medalists. From the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to the countless discoveries in the computer and applied sciences, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of the top locations for technological innovation.
The Musical Piece
In 1957, the Illiac Suite was generated by Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson for a String Quartet. When deciding what instruments that the composed music would be played on, technical limits excluded the use of electronic instruments and the piano. Instead, a string quartet was chosen for the ability to create 4 distinct voices that were similar in timbre.
First Movement
The first movement of the Illiac Suite was designed to be polyphonic, with a strict counterpoint for connecting each of the melodies. The rules set for this piece included melodic continuity, harmonic unison, and various rules relating to the transition between the voices. Listening to the piece, the tempo shifts from fast to slow, and then speeds up near the end again, with all four voices present at the end.
Second Movement
The second movement of the Illiac Suite was created with the purpose of showing that musical notation could be encoded. This piece features a four-voice polyphony, but all 4 voices are present the entire piece and form a beautiful soothing harmonization based on the more complex programming available.
Third Movement
The third movement contrasts with the previous two movements greatly, not only being played Allegro con brio, but also having a more chromatic approach that mirrors that of contemporary music. Because the original musical generation was far too dissonant, the researchers added more traditional rules that would smooth out some of the jarring sections. This piece is also unique in using a lot of pizzicato and a greater selection of string instrument sounds.
Fourth Movement
The fourth movement is fundamentally different from the previous movements in that the previous movements utilized traditional rulesets in the generation of the music, whereas the generation of this movement employed the use of Markov chains (where the choice of the next note is completely based on probability and the previous note). Despite not using any standard musical techniques, the music created closely resembles modern contemporary music.
Pros and Cons
The creation of the Illiac Suite garnered a lot of negative criticism, as composers claimed that generating music gets rid of all the joy and pleasure while manually creating music and devalues the time and effort put into composing music. Despite the criticism, it was fascinating how a machine was able to create convincing music that sounded great. However, there were shortcomings of the Illiac Suite. Even though the chords and melodic connection of the piece was close to flawless, the piece lacked a sense of direction and purpose. There wasn’t the intuition to make the piece guided to a climax or have the flow of themes within a piece, as the rules did not include that. Despite that, the ability to generate music based on simple rules is still astounding.
Sources:
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Lejaren Hiller.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 19 Feb. 2020, www.britannica.com/biography/Lejaren-Hiller.
Ewer, Gary. “What the ‘Illiac Suite’ Taught Us About Music.” The Essential Secrets of Songwriting, 27 May 2013, www.secretsofsongwriting.com/2013/05/27/what-the-illiac-suite-taught-us-about-music/.
“Illiac Suite.” Musica Informatica, www.musicainformatica.org/topics/illiac-suite.php.
“ILLIAC.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Sept. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILLIAC.
Nunzio, Alex Di. “Lejaren Hiller.” Musica Informatica, 2017, www.musicainformatica.org/topics/lejaren-hiller.php.
“University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Sept. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Illinois_at_Urbana–Champaign.
“University of Illinois School of Music University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.” EMS – History – Lejaren Hiller | Music at Illinois, music.illinois.edu/ems-history-lejaren-hiller.
With respect to your pros and cons section, I find it very fascinating how the general perception electronic music has changed from potential competitor to useful tool for musicians. Though the role of computers in music is firmly established as just a tool that nonetheless still needs producers to operate, it would be interesting to revisit the old competitive standpoint with the surge of interest in machine learning. As neural networks have become even better than humans at recognizing patterns in some disciplines, the possibility that these AI could analyze music pattern even better humans producers, thus producing music more pleasant than humans can product, is a very chilling thought.
Like Raymond, I thought it was very interesting to think about the perception of computers as the antithesis of human artfulness. Computers are now considered essential creative *tools* but I don’t think they’re seen, or at least I don’t see them, as capable of creating meaningful storylines yet. As you wrote, the Illiac pieces lacked flow/climax/purpose. I’m not saying it’s impossible – I’m sure that just as you can induce a bunch of rules for moving from chord to chord, etc, you can induce rules for the flow of a piece. But at least to me maybe there’s something disconnecting or less meaningful about listening to something created “purely” by a machine. Which I think is impossible. Because we’re programming the machines – I mean just look at how much the programmers tinkered with Illiac.