As someone who went through western European modernist composition school (and who while entering it fully believed in the supremacy of modernist music) it was a painful process to notice that most of the post IIWW ("classical") music that was composed in Europe is so unconnected to - not just wider audience - but what I'd call a physical aspect of music: pulse and resonance. Most of it just makes the audience feel anxious and confused, if they even are able to pay attention.
It was then like waking up from a nightmare when I discovered the American school of minimalism. It restored my faith into art music and that writing for classical instruments still makes sense in the 21th century. So, it makes me wonder why the article doesn't mention what I think the greatest masterpiece of aleatoric music which was the starting point of minimalist music - Terry Riley's In C [1]. It comes from other continent than the original aleatoric music and it's aesthetic is "bit" different but it has aleatoric structure - and also listening it is joyful experience which I can't say about most of the examples linked in the article.
As a former wanna-be-serious classical musician I heartily echo your sentiment. The general movement in art (the various "modern" movements) seems to have been both to reject traditionalisms and designed to make people feel bad. It also happened in music. I've heard it called the "The Unbearable Irrelevance of Contemporary Music".
There's some kind of draw in the hyper-academic avant-garde-ish arts scene that seems to produce mostly forgettable rubbish. But if you take into account that "90% of everything is crap" then there seems to be (slowly) some interesting art trends emerging. American musical minimalism is something I came across only in my thirties, somehow completely oblivious to it as a movement even though I was familiar with a few notable composers like Philip Glass. Once I dove into it, I found it fantastic, joyful, energetic, and most importantly impactful.
I think the composer I found that most reflects our observation here is Steve Reich, who's early work is semi-interesting academic avant-garde-ish naval gazing. But he eventually finds a real voice and his later works are mesmerizing energetic journeys -- and he's had deep impact on modern music across a number of genres.
They've given me hope that I'll find similar artists in other fields that are producing novel, interesting, and ultimately beautiful and impactful work.
Randomness is just one of many possible algorithms generative music can use.
For example: Music for Airports is built from very long tape loops with different durations. It's completely deterministic, but the results sound like a random-ish stream of constantly changing note patterns.
It only works because no human has a long enough memory to hear the loops as loops. If our short term memories could hold a long loop as a percept we'd have a very different and less interesting listening experience.
So much this. The postwar period was more than a little insane - a combination of bureaucracy, technocracy, and competitive academic over-intellectualisation. Academic music mirrored all of this.
But the aesthetics date back to a 19th century music theorist called Hanslick who was aggressively against emotional expression in music. (He literally said women are too emotional to be good composers.)
Postwar academic composers fell in love with this idea, and the result was a torrent of abrasively pretentious tuneless nonsense, most of which was forgotten almost immediately after being written.
That's where most aleatoric music lives. It's not as clever or interesting as it pretends to be. There's nothing outstandingly effective about using dice or radio channels or the I Ching or whatever to spray notes and sounds around.
In C is a bit different because the randomness is limited to selecting and playing entire phrases that (mostly) fit together. It's a much older, less extreme, and more accessible version that isn't too random because of the phrase content.
> most of the post IIWW ("classical") music that was composed in Europe is so unconnected to - not just wider audience - but what I'd call a physical aspect of music: pulse and resonance
On the contrary, pulse and resonance are two of the most intensively explored themes on post WW2 music!
Just two examples from the top of my head (among uncountable others...):
A big part of avantgarde music is also conceptually connected to the philosophical and artistic movements of their times, e.g. postmodernism so some of what you critique it for might be the declared goal of the people making it.
On top of that the people making something will often find different aspects interesting than the people consuming something. Musicians have different ears when listening because they have listened much more focused to potentially much more music. Just like a programmer can find value in someones weird experimental github repo that seems like a waste of time to the layperson, musicians can find value in music and sounds the typical music consumer finds actively horrible.
Let's not forget the avantgarde is about trying new things out. And those attempts are bound to fail a lot of the times. The professional or academic world might be interested in those attempts. Film students might find interesting ideas in obscure european film makers etc. This is normal, they look for something else in films than someone who seeks some entertainment after work.
> Most of it just makes the audience feel anxious and confused, if they even are able to pay attention.
Yeah, I didn't go into it as optimistic as you, but I remember thinking about Ligeti's "microtonal fugue" music: that just sounds like a swarm of depressed bees. At best it works as a one-off joke.
But then it felt like they were unaware and indifferent to each other's gimmicks as well. Feels like I've heard "striking a tamtam then quickly dipping it in water" (boinng!) from an awful lot of "original" modernist composers .
I agree that American minimalism is the main part of conservatory-guarded prestige music where there's actually something interesting - although it, too, started in some dubious and awfully arrogant theorizing.
Randomness need not cause anxiety and/or confusion. Think of the sound of rain or waves reaching the beach. As always with the musical experience its an interplay between being familiar with a given sound scape and associating it with pleasurable feelings and the composed sound actually intentionally triggering such responses. My guess is that "aleatoric" composers simply have not struck the right random notes yet :-)
Yes. I code for living but still compose music. This of course means I don't have much time to commit for composing but being financially independent has allowed me to compose exactly the kind of music I want. In the spring I had a premier of my orchestral piece at local philharmonic orchestra. Unfortunately not allowed to share the recording but you can find some of my other compositions from Soundcloud: www.soundcloud.com/henrisokka
I think of the album “Thought for Food” by The Books. There is a sample saying “aleatoric” and plenty of demonstration. Here’s the 9.0 Pitchfork review:
One piece that isn't explicitly linked in the article but which makes very effective (but limited) use of aleatoric techniques is Lutosławski's Symphony Nº 3 which premiered in 1983. From Wikipedia:
> Many passages in the Symphony no. 3 employ Lutosławski's by-then well developed technique which he called "limited aleatorism", in which the individual players in the orchestra are each asked to play their phrase or repeated fragment in their own time — rhythmically independent from the other musicians. During these passages very little synchronisation is specified: events that are coordinated include the simultaneous entrances of groups of instruments, the abrupt end of some episodes, and some transitions to new sections. By this method the composer retains control of the symphony's architecture and the realisation of the performance, while simultaneously creating complex and somewhat unpredictable polyphony.
I'm not someone who listens to a lot of contemporary music but this piece has been a favourite for over thirty years and I still find it thrilling today.
> in which the individual players in the orchestra are each asked to play their phrase or repeated fragment in their own time — rhythmically independent from the other musicians.
That's something that exists in many cultures across the world, including in Europe in western Scotland and some parts of the Balkans. They usually call it heterophony.
I wasn’t familiar with the term but from Wikipedia it seems to refer to the same melodic phrase being played by different musicians. Lutoslawski assigns different phrases to different instruments which is not quite the same.
"Aleatoric" may sound more high-brow, but it's basically just a synonym for random. In French "nombre aléatoire" is the computing term for "random number".
I think it would be better to say that it's random-inspired - you get a riff or a piece of a melody, but the whole song still has some artist-imposed structure or else it would be unlistenable. There's some nuance that I feel is worth distinguishing with its own word.
If you’re interested in checking this out, a really good place to start with aleatoric music is Charles Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”[1]. If you listen to this you can get the gist of the idea very quickly: The composer writes the trumpet call exactly but the relationship between the trumpet and the strings (representing the “wisdom of the sages” if my memory serves correctly) is somewhat random. Although every performance of the piece has broadly the same effect they are not exactly similar.
There were two main thrusts of aleatoric music - American and European, with the European school having big compositional elements that were pretty much fixed and the random elements being ordering etc (main example, Stockhausen’s late Klavierstuken) and the American school where there was a much more radical aesthetic and more randomness overall (Cage being the principal exponent) both in composition and performance. So Cage embraced randomness in composition using first Tarot and coin flips and later I-Ching divinations to decide almost every element of compositions and then also gave the performer liberty to make various decisions as well.[2]
Like lots of things in music, the classical tradition was not first to aleatoricism, with Jazz and various folk forms of music having elements of this long before straight music.
[2] The ultimate/most notorious expression of this is of course 4’33”, where the audience and performer jointly experience whatever random sounds occur during a specific period of time but don’t actively do anything at all. Perhaps a more approachable intro to John Cage would be his music for prepared piano, which shows him on the path to giving up more control of the music, because the nature of prepared piano is such that the sounds are going to be very variable from performance to performance but within broad guidelines.
As often with Wikipedia articles, It is the academic view that dominates. It may historically accurate, but it is still misleading.
If you are not familiar with how music is produced today, I can tell you there is nothing "high art" about this anymore. Gazillions software and plugins are designed on those premises. And this not only for Algorithmic/AI uses, or even just in electronic music genres.
I’m simultaneously in agreement but also drawn to defending the idea. I do think a real distinction can be drawn between human and/or physical chance as part of music composition, and software random numbers. Software random numbers are extra boring and predictable - you know everything about a distribution and it’s behavior a-priori; rolling electronic dice doesn’t add anything interesting. Some (not all, but some) of the examples in the Wikipedia article are not synonymous with software randomness. Chance in a music composition (or any work) can be intentional and arbitrary without being random, in a way that software does not and cannot really capture, at least not yet.
There is also a continuing academic following of the work of Ives and others in music composition circles, and I feel pretty sure most of them would disagree vehemently with the assertion that software plugins even remotely represent the same concept as what they’re trying to do.
But maybe to agree with you somewhat, there has for a while been a weird fascination with randomness among “generative” artists, which might be tied up in popular narratives about free will. Now that computers have gotten really powerful, it’s become more clear that randomness might add salt here and there, but relying on it makes art overall muddy and lacking in intention. I think people are generally coming around to find that randomness doesn’t really add surprise. Same goes for AI at this point - each new neural network is magic for a short while, but then everyone starts to notice it’s producing the same thing.
I believe the digital randomness can be "tuned" to be very musical (even though it often is not). Sort of like how some modern video games with random elements have a "fun random" rather than mathematically accurate random generation. For example, League of Legends "crit smoothing".
The digital modules by 'Make Noise' are a favorite of mine for this, especially the collaborations with 'soundhack'. They can't listen to the other instrumentation in a piece, but I'm positive they have some built in idea of holding back and then letting loose. They take a lot of inspiration from Don Buchla's analog random generators which were meant to be a semi-controlled random source rather than having a white-noise based random core.
'Mutable Instruments' actually has some modules that can take a rhythmic trigger sequence to generate appropriately matching random fluctuations.
I do agree most plugins and digital hardware with random are rather soulless PRNG's. But it's possible to make something that feels like it has a personality.
> a real distinction can be drawn between human and/or physical chance as part of music composition, and software random numbers
That's a good point.
> weird fascination with randomness among “generative” artists, which might be tied up in popular narratives about free will
A lot of modern art has a more "didactic" than aesthetic function. Once we assimilate/feel those (intellectual) lessons, they aren't of much use anymore. But the weight of habit/legacy/prestige lives on.
> each new neural network is magic for a short while, but then everyone starts to notice it’s producing the same thing
I don't agree. Deep learning is indeed lifeless/unconscious. It is also more akin to a complex system [1] than a random one. The way such systems create order out of randomness is fascinating to me. We don't know what life is (yet). So, we really can't say what a "lifeless" complex system is capable of.
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 realization is left to the determination of its performer(s).
It was then like waking up from a nightmare when I discovered the American school of minimalism. It restored my faith into art music and that writing for classical instruments still makes sense in the 21th century. So, it makes me wonder why the article doesn't mention what I think the greatest masterpiece of aleatoric music which was the starting point of minimalist music - Terry Riley's In C [1]. It comes from other continent than the original aleatoric music and it's aesthetic is "bit" different but it has aleatoric structure - and also listening it is joyful experience which I can't say about most of the examples linked in the article.
1: https://youtu.be/DpYBhX0UH04