not limited to religious or art music.
The Quadrille Melodist, sold by Professor J. Clinton of the Royal Conservatory
of Music, London (1865) was marketed
as a set of cards that allowed a pianist to
generate quadrille music (similar to a
square dance). The system could apparently make 428 million quadrilles. 34
Right at the outset of the computer
age, algorithmic composition moved
straight into the popular, kit-builder’s
domain. The Geniac Electric Brain allowed customers to build a computer
with which they could generate automatic tunes (see Figure 2). 36 Such systems find their modern counterpart
in the automatic musical accompaniment software Band-in-a-Box (http://
band-in-a-box.com/).
The avant-garde. After World War
II, many Western classical music com-
posers continued to develop the serialf
technique invented by Arnold Schön-
berg (1874–1951) et al. Though gener-
ally seen as a radical break with tradi-
tion, in light of the earlier historical
examples just presented, serialism’s
detailed organization can be viewed
as no more than a continuation of
the tradition of formalizing musical
composition. Indeed, one of the new
generation’s criticisms of Schönberg
was that he radicalized only pitch
structure, leaving other parameters
(such as rhythm, dynamic, even form)
in the 19th century. 6 They looked to
the music of Schönberg’s pupil Anton
von Webern for inspiration in organiz-
ing these other parameters according
to serial principles. Hence the rise of
the total serialists: Boulez, Stockhau-
sen, Pousseur, Nono, and others in
Europe, and Milton Babbitt and his
students at Princeton.g
Several composers, notably Xenakis
(1922–2001) and Ligeti (1923–2006),
f Serialism is an organizational system in which
pitches (first of all) are organized into so-called
12-tone rows, where each pitch in a musical
octave is present and, ideally, equally distrib-
uted throughout the piece. This technique was
developed most famously by Schönberg in the
early 1920s at least in part as a response to the
difficulty of structuring atonal music, music
with no tonal center or key (such as C major).
Much of the
resistance to
algorithmic
composition that
persists to
this day stems
from the misguided
bias that
the computer,
not the composer,
composes
the music.
offered criticism of and alternatives
to serialism, but, significantly, their
music was also often governed by complex, even algorithmic, procedures.h
The complexity of new composition
systems made their implementation
in computer programs ever more attractive. Furthermore, development
of software algorithms in other disciplines made cross-fertilization rife.
Thus some techniques are inspired
by systems outside the realm of music (such as chaos theory (Ligeti,
Désordre), neural networks (Gerhard E.
Winkler, Hybrid II “Networks”), 39 and
Brownian motion (Xenakis, Eonta).
Computer-Based
Algorithmic Composition
Lejaren Hiller (1924–1994) is widely
recognized as the first composer to
have applied computer programs to
algorithmic composition. The use of
specially designed, unique computer
hardware was common at U.S. universities in the mid-20th century. Hiller
used the Illiac computer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to
create experimental new music with
algorithms. His collaboration with
Leonard Isaacson resulted in 1956
in the first known computer-aided
composition, The Illiac Suite for String
Quartet, programmed in binary, and
using, among other techniques, Markov Chainsi in “random walk” pitch-generation algorithms. 38
Famous for his own random-pro-cess-influenced compositions, if not
his work with computers, composer
John Cage recognized the potential
of Hiller’s systems earlier than most.
The two collaborated on HPSCHD,
a piece for “ 7 harpsichords playing
randomly-processed music by Mozart and other composers, 51 tapes
of computer-generated sounds, approximately 5,000 slides of abstract
h For a very approachable introduction to the
musical thought of Ligeti and Xenakis, see
The Musical Timespace, chapter 2, 9 particularly
pages 36–39.
