Lejaren Arthur Hiller Jr. (February 23, 1924 – January 26, 1994) was an American composer, computer scientist, and chemist.
Career
Hiller was born on February 23, 1924, in New York City. His father, Lejaren Hiller Sr., was a well-known art photographer who specialized in historical tableaux. As a child, Lejaren Jr. played piano, oboe, clarinet, and saxophone. While earning a degree in chemistry at Princeton University, he also studied composition with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt.
In 1957, he collaborated with Leonard Isaacson on his Illiac Suite, Hiller was met with hostility from the musical establishment; both Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians refused to include him until shortly before his death.
A majority of Hiller's works after 1957 do not involve computers at all, but might include stochastic music, indeterminacy, serialism, Brahmsian traditionalism, jazz, performance art, folk song and counterpoint mixed together. In 1958, Hiller founded the Experimental Music Studios at the University of Illinois. He created the MUSICOMP ("MUsic SImulator-Interpreter for COMpositional Procedures") programming language for music composition with Robert Baker in order to create their Computer Cantata (1963).