An example of a closed mobile musical composition is Stockhausen's Zyklus (1959). In this sense, a "mobile form" can be either "open" or "closed". However, "open form" in music is also used in the sense defined by the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin ( Renaissance und Barock, 1888) to mean a work which is fundamentally incomplete, represents an unfinished activity, or points outside of itself.
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati composed a series of influential "mobiles" such as Interpolation (1958). Open form is a term sometimes used for mobile or polyvalent musical forms, where the order of movements or sections is indeterminate or left up to the performer. The First Symphony of Alfred Schnittke uses aleatoric techniques as only one of a number of approaches to the 'chaos' of 20th century life (Schnittke also uses Ivesian dissonance to similar effect).
Still, both the aesthetic aims as well as the number of elements controlled by chance make the two methods clearly different. One of Cage's pieces, HPSCHD, (see also his books of changes for more musical examples ) itself composed using chance procedures, uses music from Mozart's Musikalisches Würfelspiel, referred to above, as well as original music. There has been considerable confusion of the terms aleatory and indeterminate/chance music. In some works by Krzysztof Penderecki characteristic sequences are repeated quickly, producing a kind of oscillating sound. Lutosławski calls these sections 'ad libitum'. A form of limited aleatory was used by Witold Lutosławski (beginning with Jeux Vénitiens in 1960–61) (Rae 2001), where extensive passages of pitches and rhythms are fully specified, but the rhythmic coordination of parts within the ensemble is subject to an element of chance. Other early European examples of aleatoric music include Klavierstück XI (1956) by Karlheinz Stockhausen, which features 19 elements to be performed in a sequence to be determined in each case by the performer (Boehmer 1967, 72). The French composer and broadcaster Pierre Schaeffer developed the term jeu (French for play) in reference to a technique of allowing random sounds to enter into a musical composition. In Europe, following the introduction of the expression "aleatory music" by Meyer-Eppler, the French composer Pierre Boulez was largely responsible for popularizing the term (Boulez 1957), using it to describe works that give the performer certain liberties with regard to the sequencing and repetition of parts. Depending on the vehemence of the technique, Hovhaness’s published scores label these sections “spirit murmur” and “controlled chaos”. Some scholars regard the resultant blur as "hardly aleatory, since exact pitches are carefully controlled and any two performances will be substantially the same" (Rosner and Wolverton 2001) although, according to another writer, this technique is essentially the same as that later used by Witold Lutosławski (Fisher 2010). Later American composers, such as Alan Hovhaness (beginning with his Lousadzak of 1944) used procedures superficially similar to Cowell's, in which different short patterns with specified pitches and rhythm are assigned to several parts, with instructions that they be performed repeatedly at their own speed without coordination with the rest of the ensemble. Cowell also used specially devised notations to introduce variability into the performance of a work, sometimes instructing the performers to improvise a short passage or play ad libitum (Griffiths 2001). 3, 1934), which allows the players to arrange the fragments of music in a number of different possible sequences.
Henry Cowell adopted Ives’s ideas during the 1930s, in such works as the Mosaic Quartet (String Quartet No.
The earliest significant use of aleatory features is found in many of the compositions of American Charles Ives in the early 20th century. (One such dice game is attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.) These games consisted of a sequence of musical measures, for which each measure had several possible versions, and a procedure for selecting the precise sequence based on the throwing of a number of dice (Boehmer 1967, 9–47).Īmerican composer John Cage's Music of Changes (1951) is the first piece to be conceived largely through random procedures (Randel 2002, 17), though for just this reason his indeterminacy is of a different order from Meyer-Eppler's concept. A later genre was the Musikalisches Würfelspiel or musical dice game, popular in the late 18th and early 19th century. Compositions that could be considered a precedent for aleatoric composition date back to at least the late 15th century, with the genre of the catholicon, exemplified by the Missa cuiusvis toni of Johannes Ockeghem.