Download Aleatoric Music - Hamden High School Music Program

Hamden High School
Department of Fine Arts
Music Composition
Aleatoric Music
Aleatoric music, also called chance music, (aleatory from Latin alea, “dice”), 20th-century
music in which chance or indeterminate elements are left for the performer to realize. The term
is a loose one, describing compositions with strictly demarcated areas for improvisation according
to specific directions and also unstructured pieces consisting of vague directives, such as “Play
for five minutes.”
The indeterminate portion of aleatory music commonly occurs in two areas. The performers may
be told to arrange the structure of the piece—e.g., by reordering its sections or by playing
sections simultaneously as they wish. The musical score may also indicate points where
performers are to improvise or even to include quasi-theatrical gestures. Such requirements may
give rise to inventive notation, including brackets enclosing a blacked-out space, suggesting pitch
area and duration of the improvisation. Among notable aleatory works are Music of Changes
(1951) for piano and Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958), by the American composer John
Cage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzLwJHxM3aU) , and Klavierstück XI (1956; Keyboard
Piece XI), by Karlheinz Stockhausen (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhsvKEjxy7c) of
Germany.
Even W.A. Mozart (18th century) experimented with chance in a music game based on dice
throws (http://jmusic.ci.qut.edu.au/jmtutorial/MozartDiceGame.html).
For your aleatoric composition, you need to decide how to go about randomizing the music. This
gets into the concepts of structure vs. freedom. Do you want to limit the choices of pitches to
only three pitches, white notes of the keyboard, black notes, all the keys, just pitches in a one
octave range, or pitches spread over the whole piano keyboard? Similarly, do you want the
rhythms to be randomly generated, or do you want that controlled by you? Write a brief
proposal, including how your composition will be constructed and what instruments you want to
use. Is this piece written in traditional staff notation or are you going to invent your own
notation? Will this piece instruct the performer to improvise, or will it be all written out?
As you proceed with the process keep in mind that the piece needs to be capable of being
performed.
See next page for some examples of alternative music notation.
The Magic Circle of Infinity, George Crumb
Hans-Christoph Steiner's score for Solitude
Listen to Solitude on this web site: http://at.or.at/hans/solitude/
Other examples: