HPSCHD, University of Illinois Press, 2027
April 13th, 2026 by Tiffany Funk
HPSCHD: Inside John Cage and Lejaren A. Hiller Jr.’s Radical Multimedia Collaboration
Forthcoming, University of Illinois Press, 2027.
The first sustained study of Cage and Hiller’s 1969 multimedia work, drawing on archival research and original analysis to read HPSCHD as a foundational moment in the history of human-machine collaboration. Across seven harpsichordists, fifty-two computer-generated tapes, and thousands of slides and films playing simultaneously, HPSCHD proposed a model of performance in which no single signal could claim priority — programming as score, code as composition, listening as a practice of inhabiting systems too large to hold whole. This book recovers that proposition and asks what it still has to tell us about art, computation, and the limits of control.
Summary:
In the late 1960s, John Cage and Lejaren A. Hiller Jr. embarked on programming and organizing a participatory, computer-assisted music event larger than any before (and most after). The result, HPSCHD, constituted a crucial moment in the history of software in artistic practice. Engaging both Cage’s interest in indeterminacy as well as Hiller’s creative application of information theory in composition, the two collaborators programmed an event juxtaposing the mechanical simplicity of the harpsichord with the complex capabilities of a supercomputer to investigate procedural and ontological notions of chance operations. This ambitious multi-media performance was composed of seven solo pieces for harpsichord derived from processed works by Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni, Schoenberg, Cage, and Hiller, 52 microtonal, computer-generated magnetic tapes, and over 8,000 slides and 40 films.
