page_title: Herbert Brün
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Herbert Brün / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the Performers Workshop Ensemble, ca 1980, a group of musicians and composers founded by Herbert Brun. Outside the Music Building at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
context_page_description: Herbert Brün was a composer and pioneer of electronic and computer music. Born in Berlin, Germany, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1962 until he retired, several years before his death.
context_section_description: Brün left Germany in 1936 to study piano and composition at the Jerusalem Conservatory (later renamed Israel Academy of Music) in (then) Palestine with Stefan Wolpe, Eli Friedman and Frank Pelleg.  While in Palestine, he also worked as a jazz pianist.  In 1948, he received a scholarship to further his studies at
  Tanglewood and Columbia University through 1950.
  His work as an electronic-music composer began in Paris in the late 1950s, at the WDR studio in Cologne, and at the Siemens studio in Munich. During the 1950s,
  he also worked as composer and conductor of music for the theater, gave
  lectures and seminars emphasizing the function of music in society, and
  did a series of broadcasts on contemporary music.
  After a lecture tour
  of the United States in 1962, he was invited by Lejaren Hiller to join
  the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Computation for 1963-64,
  at the conclusion of which he was asked to stay on as a member of the
  faculty. In Illinois, Brün began research on composition with computers, which resulted in pieces for tape and instruments, tape alone, and graphics. His compositions from this period include Futility 1964 (1964) and Non Sequitur VI (1966). Non Sequitur VI was generated using the MUSICOMP programming language developed by Hiller and Robert Baker at the Experimental Music Studios.
  Brün began programming in FORTRAN in the late 1960s as he pursued an interest in designing processes. This work resulted in Infraudibles (1968) and mutatis mutandis (1968). The latter was a series of computer graphics for interpretation by composer/performers.
  From 1968–74, he co-taught courses at the Biological
  Computer Lab with Heinz von Foerster (Professor of Electrical Engineering,
  Physics, and Biology) on cybernetics, heuristics, composition, cognition,
  and social change. In 1974, the members of the class published the book
  The Cybernetics of Cybernetics.
  In 1972, Brün created a new synthesis technique which generated new timbres by linking and merging tiny portions of waveforms. (Efforts along similar lines are described in the article Granular synthesis.) From 1980 on, he toured and taught with the Performers' Workshop Ensemble, a group he founded.
  Brün was instrumental in helping the then fledgling
  Computer Music Association get started in the middle 1970s, helping host
  conferences at the University of Illinois in 1975, and again in 1987. He
  was invited to give the keynote address at their annual conference
  in 1985.
  Brün was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Goethe University Frankfurt (1999), and the Norbert Wiener medal from the American Society for Cybernetics in 1993. He helped found the School for Designing a Society in 1993 and taught there through the year 2000.
  His awards and honors also include the SEAMUS Award for
  Lifelong Achievement (2000), and a prize from the International Society of
  Bassists (1977). In 1969, he was Distinguished Visiting
  Professor at Ohio State University. He was one of two participants from
  the United States invited by UNESCO to their symposium Music and Technology 
  (1970). He was Guest Professor invited jointly by
  the Hochschule der Künste and the Technische Universität Berlin (1978);
  Composer in residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore
  (May 1982); Composer in Residence at the University of Missouri
  (Kansas City) (1983); and Guest Composer at the annual convention
  of the Percussive Arts Society, St. Louis (1987).
  Brün's students at the University of Illinois were referred to, often pejoratively, as Brünettes. His notable students include Stuart Saunders Smith.
caption: The Performers Workshop Ensemble. Left to right: Lesley Olson, Sam Magrill, Pam Richman, Susan Parenti, Arun Chandra, Mark Sullivan, Mark Enslin
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