Page 304 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

302

IN CONTEXT
I CAN’T UNDERSTAND FOCUS

Indeterminacy, aleatory
WHY PEOPLE ARE music, and silence

BEFORE
1787 Mozart is thought to
FRIGHTENED OF write “Instructions for the

composition of as many
NEW IDEAS; I’M waltzes as one desires
with two dice, without
understanding anything
FRIGHTENED OF about music or composition.”

1915 Marcel Duchamp
composes Erratum musicale
THE OLD ONES for three voices, written by
drawing cards out of a hat.
4'33" (1952), JOHN CAGE AFTER
1967 Cornelius Cardew
completes Treatise, a large
graphic score with no
musical parameters.
1983 Morton Feldman
completes String Quartet No. 2,
his longest work exploring the
slow unfolding of music.

or centuries, “indeterminacy”
has been a compositional
F feature of classical music—
from Baroque works with a figured
bass that trusts the keyboard player
to fill in the harmony in a manner
not stipulated by the composer, to
the “musical dice games” that were
popular in the 18th century, in
which players threw dice to decide
on the order of a series of musical
ideas given by a composer. A
version of the game attributed
to Mozart, for example, has the
possibility of creating as many
as 45,949,729,863,572,161 waltzes.
In the 20th century, avant-garde
composers pushed the concept
further, and the term “aleatory

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