#hpschd

[thesobsister]

Poster for John Cage performance of HPSCHD at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, May 16, 1969

[williamtea]

I LOVE RESEARCH I LOVE DOING RESEARCH. HUGH LECAINE CONTRIBITED TO HPSCHD. HIS INVENTION CONTRIBUTED TO THE PERFORMANCE.

[briancassidy]

HIGHLIGHTS FROM CATALOG 11: 

[CAGE, John and Lejaren A. Hiller]. [Complete Set of Three Silk-Screened Posters for Cage's Performance of HPSCHD]. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1969. First Edition. Three large original silk-screened posters, each roughly 38" by 28" and on heavy "construction"-like paper.

HPSCHD (pronounced “harpsichord”) premiered at the Assembly Hall of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 16, 1969 as the culmination of a Cage artistic residency. One of the earliest musical works for computer, and ultimately a five-hour multimedia extravaganza, HPSCHD remains a landmark happening of the 1960s. Cage helped design and produce two of the posters using chance operations (the final example, depicting Cage as dragon slayer, we suspect is the work of a student who'd read too much Tolkien); these are therefore among his earliest forays into visual art. Fewer than one hundred of each were produced, and only 60 or so of the final poster (which required at least seven separate passes). The posters proved popular on campus and most were stolen for dorm display; individual examples are now rare, sets in this condition even more so. OCLC locates just one complete set (at the Getty, though we are aware of an uncatalogued set at Northwestern). A vivid group of posters representing some of Cage’s first visual artworks and documenting a major Fluxus performance, one that Richard Kostelanetz called “one of the great artistic environments of the decade.”

http://store.briancassidy.net/shop/cassidy/12883.html

[fetalcircuit]

John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, University of Illinois, 1969

[fetalcircuit]

John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, University of Illinois, 1969.

The end is near: my dissertation, tentatively titled “Zen and the Art of Software Performance: John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD (1967-1969) and its Legacy in Computational Art Practices and Personal Computing,” is nearing completion. Expected conference of degree: May, 2016.

http://tiffanyfunk.com/research/

[musicainformatica]

One of the posters made for the first performance of HPSCHD. The graphics by Viskupic depicts John Cage forward to a dragon with three heads: that of Bach, Beethoven and Schumann. HPSCHD

[musicainformatica]

The cover of the HPSCHD studio version, produced by Nonesuch Records. 

HPSCHD

[musicainformatica]

Another picture of the Assembly Hall before the performance of HPSCHD. You notice the banner for graphics and video projections. HPSCHD