Aleatoricism (or aleatorism) is a term for musical compositions and other forms of art resulting from "actions made by chance".

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 theorist Werner Meyer-Eppler. In practical application, in compositions by Mozart and Kirnberger, for instance, the order of the measures of a musical piece were left to be determined by throwing dice, and in performances of music by Pousseur (e.g., Répons pour sept musiciens, 1960), musicians threw dice "for sheets of music and cues". The term was popularised by the musical composer Pierre Boulez, but also Witold Lutosławski and Franco Evangelisti.

Its etymology derives from alea, Latin for "dice", and it is the noun associated with the adjectival aleatory and aleatoric.

Aleatory should not be confused with either indeterminacy,

Art

Literature

Charles Hartman discusses several methods of automatic generation of poetry in his book The Virtual Muse.

Music

The term aleatory was coined by Werner Meyer-Eppler in 1955 to describe a course of sound events that is "determined in general but depends on chance in detail". Pierre Boulez applied the term "aleatory" in this sense to his own pieces to distinguish them from the indeterminate music of John Cage. and put these ideas into practice for the first time in his electronic composition Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56), in the form of statistically structured, massed "complexes" of sounds.

Aleatoric techniques are sometimes used in contemporary film music, e.g., in John Williams's film scores and Mark Snow's music for X-Files: Fight the Future.

See also

  • 20th-century classical music
  • 21st-century classical music
  • Aesthetics
  • Aleatory variable
  • Avant-garde
  • Biomusic
  • Biomusicology
  • Constrained writing
  • Contemporary classical music
  • Generative art
  • New-age music
  • Philosophy of film
  • Philosophy and literature
  • Philosophy of music
  • Stochastic
  • Zoomusicology

References

Further reading

  • Gignoux, Anne Claire. 2003. La récriture: formes, enjeux, valeurs autour du nouveau roman. Paris: Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne. .
  • Rennie, Nicholas. 2005. Speculating on the Moment: The Poetics of Time and Recurrence in Goethe, Leopardi, and Nietzsche. Münchener Universitätsschriften: Münchener komparatistische Studien 8. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. .
  • , 1979 film by Andy Voda
  • Alison Knowles website, i.a. about her 1968 computer poem "House of Dust"
  • About SN (1984), a film by Fred Camper
  • Six Reels of Film to Be Shown in Any Order (1971), BFI Film & TV Database.