Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. With the Roman conquest, Latin was spread to countries around the Mediterranean, including a large part of Europe. Romance languages such as Aragonese, Corsican, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, Spanish and others, are descended from Latin, while word alea, meaning "dice A die is a small polyhedral object, usually cubic, used for generating random numbers or other symbols. This makes dice suitable as gambling devices, especially for craps or sic bo, or for use in non-gambling tabletop games") is music Music is an art form whose medium is sound. Common elements of music are pitch , rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture. The word derives from Greek μουσική (mousike), "(art) of the Muses." in which some element of the composition An aspect of music is any characteristic, dimension, or element taken as a part or component of music is left to chance Randomness has somewhat disparate meanings as used in several different fields. It also has common meanings which may have loose connections with some of those more definite meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "random" thus:, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
The term became known to European composers through lectures by acoustician Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical or audio engineer Werner Meyer-Eppler Werner Meyer-Eppler , was a German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist, and information theorist at Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music Initiated in 1946 by Wolfgang Steinecke, the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt , held annually until 1970 and subsequently every two years, encompass both the teaching of composition and interpretation and include premières of new works. After Steinecke's death in 1961, the courses were run by Ernst Thomas (1962–81), in the beginning of the 1950s. According to his definition, "a process is said to be aleatoric ... if its course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail" (Meyer-Eppler 1957, 55).
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History
Early precedents
Compositions that could be considered a precedent for aleatoric composition date back to at least the late 15th century, with the genre of the catholicon, exemplified by the Missa cuiusvis toni of Johannes Ockeghem Johannes Ockeghem (1410–1425, Saint-Ghislain, Belgium – February 6, 1497, Tours, France) was the most famous composer of the Franco-Flemish School in the last half of the 15th century, and is often considered the most influential composer between Dufay and Josquin des Prez. In addition to being a renowned composer, he was also an honored. A later genre was the Musikalisches Würfelspiel or musical dice A die is a small polyhedral object, usually cubic, used for generating random numbers or other symbols. This makes dice suitable as gambling devices, especially for craps or sic bo, or for use in non-gambling tabletop games game, popular in the late 18th and early 19th century. (One such dice game is attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (German: [ˈvɔlfɡaŋ amaˈdeus ˈmoːtsaʁt], full baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among.) These games consisted of a sequence of musical measures In musical notation, a bar is a segment of time defined as a given number of beats of a given duration. The word measure is heard more frequently in the U.S., while bar is used in other English-speaking countries, although musicians generally understand both usages. The word bar derives from the vertical lines which separate one measure from, for which each measure had several possible versions, and a procedure for selecting the precise sequence based on the throwing of a number of dice (Boehmer 1967, 9–47).
American composer John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most's Music of Changes (1951) is the first piece to be conceived largely through random procedures (Randel 2002, 17), though for just this reason his indeterminacy Indeterminacy in music, which began early in the twentieth century in the music of Charles Ives, and was continued in the 1930s by Henry Cowell and carried on by his student, the experimental music composer John Cage beginning in 1951 , came to refer to the (mostly American) movement which grew up around Cage. This group included the other members is of a different order from Meyer-Eppler's concept.
Modern usage
The French composer Pierre Boulez Pierre Boulez (born March 26, 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music and a conductor was largely responsible for popularizing the term (Boulez 1957), using it to describe works that give the performer certain liberties with regard to the sequencing and repetition of parts,[citation needed] an approach pioneered by avant-garde American composer-theorist Henry Cowell Henry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s: in his Mosaic Quartet (String Quartet No. 3, 1935).[citation needed] Another composer, the French broadcaster Pierre Schaeffer Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer (pronounced /piːˈjɛər hɛnˈriː məˈriː ˈʃeɪfər/ in English; 14 August 1910 – 19 August 1995) was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician of the 20th century. His innovative work and in both the sciences —particularly communications and acoustics— and the various, developed the term jeu (French for play) in reference to a technique of allowing random sounds to enter into a musical composition.[citation needed]
Early examples of aleatoric music include Klavierstück XI The Klavierstücke constitute a series of compositions by German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1956) by Karlheinz Stockhausen Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important (Barrett 1988, 45; Harvey 1975b, 705; Hopkins 1972, 33; Klein 1968, 117) but also controversial (Power 1990, 30) composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-, which features 19 elements to be performed in a sequence to be determined in each case by the performer (Boehmer 1967, 72). Witold Lutosławski Witold Lutosławski was one of the major European composers of the 20th century, and one of the pre-eminent Polish musicians during his last three decades. During his lifetime, Lutosławski earned many international awards and prizes, including the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honour began using aleatory with Jeux vénitiens in 1960–61, which contains passages where the pitches and rhythms are fully specified, but the rhythmic coordination of parts within the ensemble is subject to an element of chance (Rae 2001). Lutosławski calls this 'ad libitum'[citation needed]. In some works by Krzysztof Penderecki Krzysztof Penderecki is a Polish composer and conductor. His 1960 avant-garde Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra brought him to international attention, and this success was followed by acclaim for his choral St. Luke Passion. Both these works exhibit novel compositional techniques. Since the 1970s Penderecki's style has characteristic sequences are repeated quickly, producing a kind of oscillating sound.[vague]
There has been considerable confusion of the terms aleatory and indeterminate/chance music. One of Cage's pieces, HPSCHD, (see also his books of changes for more musical examples[citation needed]) itself composed using chance procedures, uses music from Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel, referred to above, as well as original music. Still, both the aesthetic Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical aims as well as the number of elements controlled by chance make the two methods clearly different.[vague]
The First Symphony of Alfred Schnittke Alfred Garyevich Schnittke was a Russian and Soviet composer. Schnittke's early music shows the strong influence of Dmitri Shostakovich. He developed a polystylistic technique in works such as the epic First Symphony (1969-1972) and First Concerto Grosso (1977). In the 1980s, Schnittke's music began to become more widely known abroad. In the 1980s, uses aleatoric techniques as only one of a number of approaches to the 'chaos' of 20th century life (Schnittke also uses Ivesian Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is widely regarded as one of the first American composers of international significance. Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an "American Original". Ives combined the dissonance to similar effect).[citation needed]
"Open form" chance music
Open form is a term sometimes used for mobile or polyvalent musical forms The term musical form is often loosely used to refer to particular musical genres or styles , which may be determined by factors such as harmonic language, typical rhythms, types of musical instrument used as well as historical and geographical origins. In the vocabulary of art-music, however, it has a more extended meaning, referring to the type, where the order of movements A movement is a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession or sections In music, a section is "a complete, but not independent musical idea" . Types of sections include the introduction or intro, exposition, recapitulation, verse, chorus or refrain, conclusion, coda or outro, fadeout, bridge or interlude. In sectional forms such as binary, the larger unit (form) is built from various smaller clear-cut units is indeterminate or left up to the performer. Roman Haubenstock-Ramati composed a series of influential "mobiles" such as Interpolation (1958).
However, "open form" in music is also used in the sense defined by the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin Heinrich Wölfflin was a famous Swiss art critic, whose objective classifying principles ("painterly" vs. "linear" and the like) were influential in the development of formal analysis in the history of art during the 20th century. He taught at Basel, Berlin and Munich in the generation that raised German art history to pre- (Renaissance und Barock, 1888) to mean a work which is fundamentally incomplete, represents an unfinished activity, or points outside of itself. In this sense, a "mobile form" can be either "open" or "closed". An example of a closed mobile musical composition is Stockhausen's Zyklus (1959). Terry Riley Terrence Mitchell Riley, born June 24, 1935, is an American composer associated with the minimalist school of Western classical music's In C (1964) was composed of 53 short sequences; each member of the ensemble can repeat a given sequence as many times as desired before going on to the next, making the details of each performance of In C unique though, because the overall course is fixed, it is a closed form.
Popular music
Randomness has also been used in popular music Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres "having wide appeal", and stands in contrast to art music, and traditional music which was disseminated orally. Although popular music sometimes is known as "pop music", the "two terms are not interchangeable. Popular music is a generic term for music of all ages, but general randomness is quite a different thing from the aleatory. Duo The Books The Books are an American experimental duo founded in New York City in 1999, consisting of guitarist and vocalist Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong. Their music is a mix of electronica, folk, and acoustic music, incorporating samples of sounds, speech and music. They have released three critically-acclaimed albums, all on the German label refer to Aleatoric Music in the words near the end of their song "Read, Eat, Sleep," repeating samples of the word 'aleatoric' and then with a sample saying "By digitising thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to compose 'Aleatoric Music'" (The Books [n.d.]). On the David Bowie David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. Active in five decades of popular music and frequently reinventing his music and image, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s. He has been cited as an influence by many musicians and is known for his distinctive voice and the album Low Low is a 1977 album by British musician David Bowie. Widely regarded as one of his most influential releases, Low was the first of the "Berlin Trilogy", a series of collaborations with Brian Eno . The experimental, avant-garde style would be further explored on "Heroes" and Lodger. The album's working title was New Music Night, Brian Eno Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno and previously as simply Eno (pronounced /ˈiːnoʊ/), is an English musician, composer, record producer, music theorist, singer and visual artist, best known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music and Bowie used a die for composing the tonal structure of the title track.[citation needed]
See also
- Aleatoricism
- Algorithmic music Algorithms have been used to compose music for centuries; the procedures used to plot voice-leading in Western counterpoint, for example, can often be reduced to algorithmic determinacy. The term is usually reserved, however, for the use of formal procedures to make music without human intervention, either through the introduction of chance
- Generative music
- Stochastic music A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic in that a system's subsequent state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element
- Indeterminacy in music Indeterminacy in music, which began early in the twentieth century in the music of Charles Ives, and was continued in the 1930s by Henry Cowell and carried on by his student, the experimental music composer John Cage beginning in 1951 , came to refer to the (mostly American) movement which grew up around Cage. This group included the other members
Sources
- Boehmer, Konrad Konrad Boehmer is a Dutch composer and writer of German birth. 1967. Zur Theorie der offenen Form in der neuen Musik. Darmstadt: Edition Tonos. (Second printing 1988.)
- The Books (musical group). [n.d.]. "'Read, Eat, Sleep' lyrics". Lyrics Mania website (Accessed 28 January 2010).
- Boulez, Pierre Pierre Boulez (born March 26, 1925) is a French composer of contemporary classical music and a conductor. 1957. "Aléa". Nouvelle Revue française, no. 59 (1 November). Reprinted in Pierre Boulez, Relevés d’apprenti, collected and presented by Paule Thévenin, 41–45. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. ISBN 2020019302. English as "Alea" in Pierre Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, collected and presented by Paule Thévenin, translated from the French by Herbert Weinstock, 35–51. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. New English translation, as "Alea", in Pierre Boulez, Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, collected and presented by Paule Thévenin, translated from the French by Stephen Walsh, with an introduction by Robert Piencikowski, 26–38. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN 0193112108
- Lieberman, David. 2006. "Game Enhanced Music Manuscript." In GRAPHITE '06: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Australasia and South East Asia, Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), November 29–December 2, 2006, edited by Y. T. Lee, Siti Mariyam Shamsuddin, Diego Gutierrez, and Norhaida Mohd Suaib, 245–50. New York: ACM Press. ISBN 1-59593-564-9
- Meyer-Eppler, Werner Werner Meyer-Eppler , was a German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist, and information theorist. 1957. "Statistic and Psychologic Problems of Sound", translated by Alexander Goehr. Die Reihe 1 ("Electronic Music"): 55–61. Original German edition, 1955, as "Statistische und psychologische Klangprobleme", Die Reihe 1 ("Elektronische Musik"): 22–28.
- Prendergast, Mark J. 2000. The Ambient Century: from Mahler to Trance: The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 0747542139
- Rae, Charles Bodman. 2001. "Lutosławski, Witold (Roman)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
- Randel, Don Michael. 2002. The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music and Musicians. ISBN 0-674-00978-9.
- Stone, Susan. 2005. "", NPR Music (7 February). (Accessed 23 September 2008)
- Wölfflin, Heinrich Heinrich Wölfflin was a famous Swiss art critic, whose objective classifying principles ("painterly" vs. "linear" and the like) were influential in the development of formal analysis in the history of art during the 20th century. He taught at Basel, Berlin and Munich in the generation that raised German art history to pre-. 1888. Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung der Barockstils in Italien. Munich: T. Ackermann. English edition: Renaissance and Baroque. Translated by Kathrin Simon, with an introduction by Peter Murray. London: Collins, 1964; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.
External links
- Art of the States: aleatoric aleatoric musical works by American composers
- Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel - online version of Mozart's dice game
- Encyclopaedia Britannica Aleatoric music
- http://www.sciencenews.org/20010901/mathtrek.asp
- http://www.anigraphical.com/
- An exploration of the stochastic randomness in modern electronic music
- John Cage's Indeterminacy
- A Visual Interpretation of Indeterminacy: Found Photos Paired with One-minute Short Stories
- Bit Byte Beat
Categories: Musical terminology Categories: Music | Classical music | Terminology | Music theory Music theory is a set of systems for analyzing, classifying, and composing music and the elements of music. Narrowly it may be defined as the description in words of elements of music, and the interrelationship toward the notation of music and performance practice. Broadly, theory may be considered any statement, belief, or concept of the music
Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:25:29 GMT+00:00
Top40-Charts.com Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatory forms. ...
