The Future Makes a Deal with Knowledge from the Past
Updated: Apr 1
Thoughts on Illiac Suite (La Chanson Finale), Parte I à III by The Lemon Club, or: From Mozart's Dice Game Composition to Electromagnetic Chamber Music — Algorithmic Compositions and Artificial Intelligence: a small leap in history, yet one that still feels enormous to many.
The First Composition as Computer Algorithm
Someone falls out of a dream and lands in a new world that feels somewhat bleak. That one sentence captures much of what "Illiac Suite (La Chanson Finale), Parte I à III" by The Lemon Club is about; especially given that the song came into being in quite conventional fashion: roughly 20 minutes on a guitar, on a girlfriend's sofa. But there's more to it, much more: the interweaving of the virtual and the real. The song's title refers to the "Illiac Suite: String Quartet No. 4" by Lejaren A. Hiller and Leonard M. Isaacson from 1957. While that Illiac Suite was the first piece written by a digital computer and performed by humans, The Lemon Club's "Illiac Suite" was written by a human but performed by a computer. Scientists and musicians Hiller and Isaacson had used the mainframe "Illiac I" to explore how composition could be implemented as computer algorithms.
The Musical Dice Game
Flipping further back through music history, we find that the original "Illiac Suite" has its precursors in the electromagnetic chamber music of the 19th century. Algorithmic composition goes back much further, of course. Canons from the 13th century, fugues from the Baroque era. One of the first on-the-spot generated aleatoric compositions was W.A. Mozart's "Musical Dice Game" from 1787: an early example of the marriage of mathematics and music, described as "a guide to composing as many waltzes or slides as one wishes with two dice, without any musical knowledge or understanding of composition."
Assembling New Pieces from Short Motifs
The first algorithmic, self-playing music machine — a kind of orchestrion that could quasi-improvise endless new pieces from short motifs using a pseudo-random number generator — was the "Componium" by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel in 1821. For those wishing to dive deeper into the world of electromagnetic chamber music, Thomas Grill's work of the same name is highly recommended: https://grrrr.org/pub/grill-2007-elektromagnetische_kammermusik.pdf — as is the concert review of American jazz guitarist Pat Metheny's 2010 Vienna performance of his mechanical masterpiece, the "Orchestrion": https://www.kulturwoche.at/musik/2220-orchestrion-pat-metheny-live-in-wien-die-kritik
The Enormous Potential Behind It
Pat Metheny told Kulturwoche.at in an interview: "In principle, I believe there is a natural synergy between acoustic music and the digital possibilities of the 21st century — there's an enormous potential there, and it's still largely unexplored." Thomas Grill's work also covers the first experiment by Hiller and Isaacson: their attempt to recreate the human musical decision-making process on a computer, directing the Illiac I mainframe to synthesize a four-movement string quartet score — the "Illiac Suite."
Respect and Complicity
Ultimately, this is also a story about respect and complicity. Mauricio Kagel, one of the leading composers of New Music in the second half of the 20th century, always regarded recording devices and magnetic tape as musical instruments. "...In this respect, just as with conventional instruments, I am full of respect and at the same time quite disrespectful. I believe one must achieve a high degree of complicity with technology. Complicity here means always being ready to look for detours that the device's manual doesn't mention, doesn't recommend, or simply doesn't allow."
Experiments with Musical Intelligence
In the case of The Lemon Club's "Illiac Suite," the device in question is Artificial Intelligence — which brings us to a key line in the song: "Emmy was gone, didn't know how to cope," an allusion to David Cope, who programmed an AI music algorithm called EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), also known as Emmy. "David Cope died in 2025," says Simon Maurer, "and an article in the New York Times was what first drew my attention to the topic and inspired this song." What emerged was a letter — a letter as lyrics. A letter addressed to the very first song composed by a computer. "I fell out of the dream / Into a new reality," The Lemon Club begins. The person writing the letter to Illiac Suite tries to feel their way back into the dream — or perhaps the past — and fails.
The Song's Wilfulness
Whether humanity will manage to handle AI with care remains to be seen. At some point, one might even wonder whether the world would have been better off if the original "Illiac Suite" had never existed. For now, the question remains open — as we hear in the final verse: "And Illiac Suite, / I tried to forgive you / But would this world miss you? / I couldn't know." Simon Maurer instructed the music-producing AI to blend classical music with pop and subtle techno elements. The song's defining character lies in this: the future making a deal with knowledge from the past. The result is 5 minutes and 25 seconds of instrumental virtuosity by a great artificial machine, fused with the singer-songwriter signature of a young musician who knows how to write catchy melodies and lyrics with genuine literary quality.
Written in German by Manfred Horak, translated into English by Claude (Anthropic). If you know a translator who would like to organically translate this and other pieces into English, feel free to contact us via our contact form.
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