Even though Herbert Brün and his works remain largely ignored by the general public, he played an important role in the development of computer music in the United States of America and was a key animator in experimental music at the University of Illinois for four decades. He left works for various solo instruments and chamber ensembles, for instruments and tape, works of musique concrète, computer works, and his mostly known for his computer graphics that could be read as scores (the Mutatis Mutandis series). Two years prior to his death in 2000, the Electronic Music Foundation's label EMF released a four-disc retrospective of his works.

Brün was born in Berlin, Germany, at the end of World War I. He grew up there and began to learn the piano. In 1936, his family moved to Tel Aviv (Palestine) where he studied piano and composition at the Jerusalem Conservatory. He also studied at Columbia University in the late '40s. His first influential teachers were Stefan Wolpe, Eli Friedman, and Frank Pelleg. His first-known works date from that period.

In the early '50s, he worked in Israel and Germany, composing, teaching, lecturing, and hosting radio series. From 1955 to 1961 he experimented with the burgeoning techniques of electro-acoustic music in Paris, Cologne, and Munich, sometimes working with Gottfried Michael Koenig. Already an original thinker with an ability to communicate, he often gave lectures and seminars on the ethical function of composition and the composer/listener relationship, a subject he held dear throughout his career.

In 1962 after a lecture tour of the U.S., Brün was offered to join Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois. He definitively established himself there the next year and began work on composition with computers, developing his own programs in the Fortran language as early as the mid-'60s. In the late '70s/early '80s, he composed a handful of works using his own SAWDUST program (Dust, More Dust, Dustiny). His computer graphic scores also date from that period. Meanwhile, he continued to compose for instruments, especially percussion (At Loose Ends:, More Dust With Percussion, Just Seven for Drum), forming in the process concert percussionists like Michael Udow and Allen Otte.

In 1978, together with composers Susan Parenti and Mark Enslin, he founded the Performers' Workshop Ensemble. He retired formally in 1988 (he was made professor emeritus at the University of Illinois the previous year), but remained an active teacher until his death in November 2000, mainly with the PWE experimental School for Designing a Society. The American Society for Cybernetics awarded him the Norbert Wiener medal in 1993. SEAMUS (the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States) gave him a posthumous Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2001. ~ François Couture, Rovi