The Experimental Music Studio, University of Illinois

Lejaren Hiller founded what is regarded as the second university-sponsored studio in the United States, the Experimental Music Studio (EMS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hiller established the EMS in time for the fall semester in 1958 after studying how the studio at Columbia, as well as those in Europe, had been organized and outfitted. EMS developed a strong academic program, becoming one of the foremost laboratories for experimental music in the United States. Hiller could see that many sanctioned studios were equipped with “a more-or-less haphazard assortment of readily available commercial electronic hardware” that was never intended for musical composition. The composer–performer was able to change many parameters of the synthesized sound, from the smallest spectrum to the overall structure. The instrument’s design lent a particularly gestural character to the resulting music, and its output ranged widely in textural and timbral manipulations.