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What?

hahaha - just kidding. I get your 'like'....

Like aleatoric music.

Aleatoric means random and is derived from the Latin for dice. The idea here of course is that the puzzle pieces would just be just stuck together at random from a mixed pile. Chances are this isn't actually possible because the edges are likely to be cut so that the shape of every piece is different and they will only fit together one way. Though it would be pretty cool if the pieces were designed to be of identical shape and contained one bar or so of music each.

But did you know that Mozart wrote some literally aleatoric music? This was posthumously published in 1773 by Hummel and republished in 1798 by Simrock. I have a 1976 facsimile reprint of this 2nd edition. It is a recipe for "composing" simple waltzes without needing to have the slightest knowledge of harmony or composition and is almost like a game. It requires two dice.

The aim is to generate an 8-bar minuet-like piece plus an 8-bar trio section. What Mozart did was to write 11 different versions of each of the 16 bars required, each version of one bar is a good fit with all versions of its neighbours. So he wrote 176 bars and gave each bar an ID number. Then he compiled two tables, one for the menuet and one for the trio, labelling the columns A to H in each case (to represent the 8 bars of the section). The rows were numbered 2 to 12, representing the 11 possible sums you can get by throwing two dice.

So you throw the dice. Say you get 3 and 5, which makes 8. So you look up row 8 and column A to find an ID number. So for the first bar of your "customised" waltz, you just copy out the bar which has that number. Repeat the process for each of the other 15 bars and there's your finished product.

It is easy to see that the number of different waltzes that you can "compose" this way is huge. There are over 214 million different minuets and the same number of trios, hence almost 46 quadrillion different complete pieces, or there would be if each bar's 11 versions really were all different, which is not quite the case. But there is still a plenty of variety.

Yes, but would even a fraction of these "varieties" sound passable?! Sometimes I find myself slaving over just one little note in a chord for a long time. Or when I revisit a piece I just have to fix this or that. And I am by no means rolling a dice, I have an image in my head of how a piece will sound. I think Aleotoric "chance" music is interesting but when you compare a mathematically, (though with some variables left to chance) composed piece to a theme in variations, unless the math is very complex, the piece will just sound comical, or annoying, however you look at it.. whereas the t and v will sound spirited, the human element, more appealing given that the composer understands harmony and has just the right amount of "classical restraint"

Yes. I'm convinced they will all sound "passable" in the context for which they were designed. They would all work as practical music to which to waltz, without the music seeming weird to the dancers. That doesn't mean they would all be particularly great pieces of music. I think Mozart will just have been having a bit of fun, demonstrating how easily and formulaically waltzes can be written. The harmony tends to follow a fairly fixed pattern, and within that framework you can modify each bar in several ways without changing its harmony. That helps to ensure that independently varied neighbouring bars will still "fit".

Not likely to happen.
Perhaps we should all hop over to Facebook, as many of out (former) members have already done. I'm starting to feel like forums are outdated.

I would call what is done by the dice thrower here as aleatoric "construction," not composing, for Mozart has already considered all the harmonic structure and determined and limited (delimited) the set of possible. However, having made this nit-pick, I never new this and do find it interesting. How is this writing titled or referrenced? Does it have a place in the catalogues?

Quite so. The real composing has already been done by Mozart. I used quote marks around "composing" because the word appears in the title.
It is (somewhat ramblingly) titled "ANLEITUNG Walzer oder Schleifer mit 2 Würflen zu componieren, so viele man will, ohne etwas von der Musik oder Composition zu verstehen."
or "INSTRUCTION To compose without the least knowledge of Music so much German Walzer or Schleifer as one pleases, by throwing a certain Number with two Dice."

Wikipedia mentions catalogue number K294d, and an additional K516f relating to construction of polonaises using two-bar phrases. It also mentions similar projects by Kirnberger (of temperament fame) and CPE Bach. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel.

Would be interesting to have a composer use this method to write a waltz, to some extent all composition is based on certain templates. But when I say "to some extent" I don't mean the new stuff. The old stuff!



I think its nice to have a place to just talk about piano, with pianists and though some have gone to facebook, I wonder if it will go out of fashion in the near future, as it was with myspace. Now it is little more than a free place for musicians to flaunt there tour dates and recordings demos. And it use to be just like facebook...

Yes that much is true. I must admit FB confuses me still (getting old, hehe) and a good old-fashioned forum has something comforting.

Today's weird find....

It's some sort of photograph altered in way that it becomes art. Very weird! I don't even know what to say about it. I do wonder if the artist thought about placing Chopin's hand down just a little....

You pick the wildest things Monica!!

I don't know why but this reminds me of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's album cover. There were so many people photoshopped on it.

But in this photo, Chopin looks like a Zombie...



Oh dear! That poor statue!

You're right! I didn't look at it like that before. That's so funny!!



You mean, poor Chopin! He'd get quite a handful. But then again....

If I'm not mistaken, I think I saw this sculpture is outside the Louvre.

In honor of valentines day, a music box grand with a lovely, but simple message:


Now if only the frame was red instead of black and in the shape of a heart...

heaven will have to wait...