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Aleatoricism (oraleatorism) is a term for musical compositions and other forms of art[citation needed] resulting from "actions made bychance".
The term was first used "in the context of electro-acoustics and information theory" to describe "a course of sound events that is determined in its framework and flexible in detail", by Belgian-German physicist, acoustician, and information theoristWerner Meyer-Eppler.[1][2] In practical application, in compositions byMozart andKirnberger, for instance, the order of themeasures of a musical piece were left to be determined by throwing dice, and in performances of music byPousseur (e.g.,Répons pour sept musiciens, 1960), musicians threw dice "for sheets of music and cues".[1] However, more generally in musical contexts, the term has had varying meanings as it was applied by various composers, and so a single, clear definition for aleatory music is defied.[1] The term was popularised by the musical composerPierre Boulez,[not verified in body] but alsoWitold Lutosławski andFranco Evangelisti.
Itsetymology derives fromalea, Latin for "dice",[3] and it is the noun associated with the adjectivalaleatory andaleatoric.
Aleatory should not be confused with eitherindeterminacy,[3] orimprovisation.[1][failed verification]
Sean Keller and Heinrich Jaeger coined the termaleatory architecture to describe "a new approach that explicitly includes stochastic (re-) configuration of individual structural elements — that is to say 'chance.'"[4]
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Charles Hartman discusses several methods of automatic generation of poetry in his bookThe Virtual Muse.[5]
The termaleatory was coined byWerner Meyer-Eppler in 1955 to describe a course of sound events that is "determined in general but depends on chance in detail".[2] When his article was published in English, the translator mistakenly rendered his German nounAleatorik as an adjective, and so inadvertently created a new English word, "aleatoric".[6]Pierre Boulez applied the term "aleatory" in this sense to his own pieces to distinguish them from theindeterminate music ofJohn Cage.[1] While Boulez purposefully composed his pieces to allow the performer certain liberties with regard to the sequencing and repetition of parts, Cage often composed through the application of chance operations without allowing the performer liberties.
Another composer of aleatory music was the German composerKarlheinz Stockhausen,[1] who had attended Meyer-Eppler's seminars in phonetics, acoustics, and information theory at theUniversity of Bonn from 1954 to 1956,[7] and put these ideas into practice for the first time in his electronic compositionGesang der Jünglinge (1955–56), in the form of statistically structured, massed "complexes" of sounds.[8]
Aleatoric techniques are sometimes used in contemporary film music, e.g., inJohn Williams's film scores[clarification needed] andMark Snow's music forX-Files: Fight the Future.[9]
The concept of 'aleatory' was preferred by European composers, among them Pierre Boulez, Witold Lutosławski and Franco Evangelisti. It was first used by Werner Meyer-Eppler in the context of electro-acoustics and information theory for describing a course of sound events that is determined in its framework and flexible in detail.(6) Aleatory, a word derived from the Latinalea, has many different meanings such as dice, game of dice, risk, danger, bad surprise, and chance. Most composers using aleatory referred to the meaning of chance, but some composers referred to meanings like risk (for instance Evangelisti) and dice (Henri Pousseur composed a piece called Répons pour sept musiciens, 1960, where performers throw dice for sheets of music and cues, a procedure similar to pieces by Kirnberger or Mozart in which the order of the measures is determined by throwing a dice.). Many composers thought they dealt with chance and created chance compositions when they allowed for greater performance flexibility. None of them used chance operations as Cage did. Since many composers were skeptical about "pure" chance and mere accident they came up with the idea of "controlled chance" and "limited aleatorism" (preferred by Lutosławski).
The term aleatory was popularized in Europe by Pierre Boulez means a musical result of actions made by chance ("alea" is Latin for "dice") or choice. The composers offered the players, for example, choices of route through the fragments of their work, allowed them to join these elements freely but, at the same time, they were completely responsible for the overall shape of the work. Aleatory music is sometimes treated as a synonym of indeterminate music (indeterminacy) but the latter term was preferred by John Cage and meant not only performance liberties but also the use of chance element in the process of composition. Although aleatoricism is an extremely different musical concept than serialism, the end result of both ideas may sound surprisingly alike.
