He also studied composition with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt while earning his chemistry degree at Princeton University.
[2] His father, Lejaren Hiller, Sr., was a well-known art photographer who specialized in historical tableaux.
[citation needed] He wrote an article on the Illiac Suite for Scientific American which garnered a lot of attention from the press, generating a storm of controversy.
[citation needed] 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, folksong and counterpoint mixed together.
[4][3] In 1968, he joined the faculty at University at Buffalo as Slee Professor of Composition, where he established the school's first computer music facility and co-directed with Lukas Foss at the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts.