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Aleatoricism (or aleatorism) is a term for musical compositions and other forms of art resulting from "actions made by randomness".
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.Werner Meyer-Eppler (1955) "Statistische und psychologische Klangprobleme," Elektronische Musik, Die Reihe I (Herbert Eimert, ed.) Vienna, p. 22. English translation: Werner Meyer-Eppler (1957) "Statistic and Psychologic Problems of Sound" (Alexander Goehr, transl.). Electronic Music, Die Reihe 1 (H. Eimert, ed.), pp. 55–61, esp. p. 55. 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 Henri Pousseur (e.g., Répons pour sept musiciens, 1960), musicians threw dice "for sheets of music and cues". However, more generally in musical contexts, the term has had varying meanings as it was applied by various composers, and so a single, clear definition for aleatory music is defied. 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, or improvisation.
Another composer of aleatory music was the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who had attended Meyer-Eppler's seminars in phonetics, acoustics, and information theory at the University of Bonn from 1954 to 1956,Michael Kurtz, Stockhausen: A Biography, translated by Richard Toop (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992): 68–72. (cloth) (pbk). 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.Pascal Decroupet and Elena Ungeheuer, "Through the Sensory Looking-Glass: The Aesthetic and Serial Foundations of Gesang der Jünglinge", translated by Jerome Kohl, Perspectives of New Music 36, No. 1 (Winter 1998): 97–142. Citation on 99–100.
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.Fred Karlin and Rayburn Wright, On the Track: A Guide to Contemporary Film Scoring, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2004): 430–436. or .
In different fields
Architecture
Sean Keller and Heinrich Jaeger coined the term aleatory architecture to describe "a new approach that explicitly includes stochastic (re-) configuration of individual structural elements — that is to say 'chance.'"
Art
Literature
Charles Hartman discusses several methods of automatic generation of poetry in his book The Virtual Muse.
Music
The term aleatoric music was first 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". When his article was published in English, the translator mistakenly rendered his German noun Aleatorik as an adjective, and so inadvertently created a new English word, "aleatoric".Arthur Jacobs, "Admonitoric Note", The Musical Times '107, no. 1479 (May 1966): 414. Pierre Boulez applied the term "aleatory" in this sense to his own pieces to distinguish them from the indeterminate music of John Cage. While Boulez purposefully composed his pieces to allow the performer certain liberties with regard to the sequencing and repetition of parts, Cage often composed through the application of chance operations without allowing the performer liberties.
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