WHY/HOW/WHEN????

• Is there such a thing as total silence?

• What is music?
• What defines it?
• When did chance music begin?
• Why did chance music begin?
• How did people compose chance music?
 CHANCE OR ALEATORIC MUSIC

Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or

chance music; from the Latin word alea,
meaning "dice") is music in which some
element of the composition is left to
chance, and/or some primary element of a
composed work's realisation is left to the
determination of its performer. It
started around the 1950’s.
 CHANCE MUSIC – ALEATORIC MUSIC
• Composers set out to make music that rewrote or totally ignored the old
rules about what is music and what is not music.
• Aleatoric music is created using chance.
• A composer will decide on some initial ideas with approximate pitch, and
maybe rhythm, a chord and duration but the decisions about how the piece
should be played are left up to the performer. They could decide on the
pitch, dynamics, pitch, tempo, phrasing etc.
• Some pieces ask the performer to throw a dice to decide on repeats or
flip a coin to decide in what order to play the different sections in.
• No ‘aleatoric’ music will ever sound the same and there are unpredictable
results.
• An interesting extra is that Mozart apparently had a ‘dice’ game.
However, the music probably sounded ‘normal’!
A BIT DIFFERENT…
• Voices and instruments were used to make new
sounds…
• Voices can hum, whisper, cough, scream, whistle,
rap, sing in different languages.
• Pianos can have the wood hit, the strings inside
be plucked, string players using the other side of
their box, wind instruments using their
mouthpieces only.
• Household objects and anything else can be used
in this type of music (think of Stomp)
JOHN CAGE
4’33
This is a piece of music by a composer called John
Cage.
It is called four minutes 33 seconds.
What do you think about it and why do you think he
composed it?

Here is another piece by John Cage – do you like

it?
 WAYS TO COMPOSE USING CHANCE
METHODS
What methods can we use to compose music using
‘chance’?
 SOME ‘CHANCE’ METHODS

• Dice
• Unusual sounds
• Different ways of playing instruments
• Serialism
• Using Sibelius – random selection
 YOUR TURN
Composing using dice

1. Choose up to 5 different instruments

2. Roll the dice to see a) which you play b) how many times
you play it
3. Write down your results on the worksheet
4. Perform your composition to the rest of the class
5. What did you think of your music? Like/don’t like and a
reason why
SERIALISM

What is Serialism?
Why was it invented?