Aleatoric

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Under aleatoric (from Latin aleatorius "belonging to the player", alea "dice, risk, chance") is understood in music , art and literature in the broadest sense the use of non-systematic operations that lead to an unpredictable, largely random result. Aleatoric stands for “dicey”, dependent on chance. In music, where aleatoric emerged as a compositional technique based largely on randomness after 1950, these random operations can be used both on the level of composition and on the level of interpretation that is understood as its continuation and, for example, the type and number of instruments that The duration of the piece, the order of individual sections or the tempo.

Concept history

The adjective aleatoric was first used in a musical context in 1954 by Werner Meyer-Eppler , who used the expression as a statistical term: “A signal is called aleatoric if its course is roughly fixed and determined by statistical parameters describing mean values, but individually depends on chance . ”Meyer-Eppler uses the term“ aleatoric ”especially in connection with vibrational processes, the (electroacoustic) compositional use of which he describes; he speaks, for example, of the "aleatoric modulation".

Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen took up the term aleatorically and used it at the Darmstadt summer courses in 1957.

Boulez transferred the term to the field of musical form and, in his Darmstadt lecture Alea (1957), explained the possibilities of using chance as a compositional means in composition and interpretation. Boulez aimed for a musical development that "allows 'opportunities' to arise" in different stages and on different levels of the composition. The result is then a “string of aleatoric events within a certain duration, which itself remains indefinite”. Although this leaves a certain amount of leeway for chance or the interpreter, the composer's authorship is beyond question, since all permitted possibilities are compositionally controlled and thus chance is “absorbed”: “The work [must] offer a certain number of possible lanes by means of very precise precautions, with chance playing the role of setting the course at the last moment. "

The noun aleatoric was used for the first time in connection with Stockhausen's Piano Piece XI (1956), the parts of which are supposed to sound in random order, with tempo, volume and type of touch being prescribed at the end of the previous part. Hilmar Schatz wrote in 1957 about the piano piece XI: “This improvised-looking, seemingly coincidental interpretation moment is in reality controlled, controlled coincidence, called 'aleatoric' in the technical jargon.” This special type of design is also known as “open form” .

Stockhausen did not understand aleatorics as a concept limited to the musical, but rather as a general principle that can play a role in various areas.

John Cage

An example of an expert in aleatory works was John Cage , who had used random operations in his compositions since the 1950s. An early example is the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1951), whose orchestral parts are based, among other things, on drawing lots from the Chinese oracle book I Ching and on coin tossing. Other random methods that Cage used in other compositions focus on, for example, the nature of the paper being used, astronomical atlases, mathematical methods and working with the computer.

The starting point for these random operations is Cage's idea of ​​music, which - influenced by Zen Buddhism - he developed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. According to this, a composer should “let the notes come to themselves instead of exploiting them to express feelings, ideas or notions of order”. The musical material should be completely objective and not provided with an aesthetic sense by the composer: “The basic idea is that every thing is itself, that its relationships to other things arise naturally, without any forced abstraction on the part of one 'Artist'. "

Cage saw random operations as a universal procedure that could be applied to all areas of a composition and to any kind of musical material, and through which a composer confronted his own work, the course of which he did not know, as a recipient. Cage's "experimental music" determined by chance operations is therefore excluded from the term aleatoric by some authors. Evangelisti, for example, takes the view that a distinction must be made between chance as something unpredictable and the aleatoric as a "conscious process" with manageable possibilities.

Cage himself distinguished between chance (chance) and indeterminacy (indeterminacy). This distinction becomes evident in the composition 4'33 " (1952): The only playing instruction for the three movements is" Tacet "; the number of performers and the instrumentation are therefore freely selectable and arise" randomly ", for example as in the world premiere by The non-intentional acoustic events that take place during the randomly determined periods of time, on the other hand, are indefinite because, in contrast to the random parameters, they are not a selection from a group with known elements.

notation

Overall, the forms of aleatoric composition are considered to be very different. There are various degrees, from a slight form of indeterminacy and / or chance to an almost completely free interpretation in which most or even all of the musical characteristics are not determined by the composer. In order to do justice to the variable musical form of an aleatoric composition, the notation is often given as an ambiguous graphic representation that, for example, determines the (rough) sequence of the music or encourages the performer to improvise freely. Further possibilities of the notation are the purely verbal description, as for example in Stockhausen's From the Seven Days or a musical notation extended by special characters. Combinations of the different methods are also possible.

Others

Although the terms were aleatoric or aleatoric only coined in the 1950s, but the history of music , the use of chance operations in which composition not only since the new music known. Already in the Middle Ages, Christian monks randomly threw four differently curved iron rods in order to get a beautiful melody . A musical dice game attributed to Mozart also made use of chance and let the listener throw waltz bars with two dice at will.

literature

  • Pierre Boulez: To my III. Sonata . In: Wolfgang Steinecke (Hrsg.): Darmstadt Contributions to New Music , Vol. 3. Mainz 1960
  • Julian Klein: Aleatorik - Proposal for a definition , 1997.
  • Klaus Ebbeke: Art. "Aleatorik". In: Ludwig Finscher (Ed.): Music in Past and Present 2 , Part 1. Basel [u. a.]
  • Hanno Fierdag: The aleatoric in art and copyright. With special consideration of the computer generated works. (At the same time: Dresden, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2004), Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-8305-0890-5 ( series of publications on the law of intellectual property , vol. 20)
  • Wolf Frobenius: Aleatoric, aleatoric . In: Concise dictionary of musical terminology . Vol. 1, ed. by Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Albrecht Riethmüller , editor-in-chief Markus Bandur, Steiner, Stuttgart 1972 ( online ).
  • Josef Häusler (translator): Pierre Boulez. Workshop texts . Berlin [u. a.] 1966
  • Werner Meyer-Eppler: "On the systematics of electrical sound transformations", in: Wolfgang Steinecke (Ed.): Darmstädter Contributions to New Music , Vol. 3, Mainz 1960, pp. 73–86
  • Arnold Schering : The symbol in music . Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1941. DNB 57599746X
  • Holger Schulze: The aleatoric game. Exploration and application of the non-intentional work genesis in the 20th century (at the same time: Erlangen, Nürnberg, Univ., Diss., 1998), Munich 2000, ISBN 3-7705-3472-7

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Köbler : Legal dictionary. For study and training. 17th edition. Verlag Franz Vahlen, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-8006-5881-7 : aleatoric
  2. ↑ Werner Meyer-Eppler: On the systematics of electrical sound transformations . In: Wolfgang Steinecke (Ed.): Darmstädter Contributions to New Music , Vol. 3. Mainz 1960, p. 79.
  3. ^ A b Pierre Boulez: Alea . In: Josef Häusler (transl.): Pierre Boulez. Workshop texts . Berlin [u. a.] 1966, p. 104 f.
  4. ↑ Pierre Boulez: To my III. Sonata . In: Wolfgang Steinecke (Ed.): Darmstädter Contributions to New Music , Vol. 3. Mainz 1960, p. 30.
  5. ↑ Hilmar Schatz quoted from: W. Frobenius: Art. "Aleatorisch, Aleatorik". In: Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Ed.): Concise dictionary of musical terminology . Stuttgart [u. a.] 1976, p. 3.
  6. ↑ John Cage quoted from: W. Frobenius: Art. "Aleatorisch, Aleatorik". In: Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Ed.): Concise dictionary of musical terminology . Stuttgart [u. a.] 1976, p. 7.
  7. ↑ John Cage quoted from: K. Ebbeke: Art. "Aleatorik". In: L. Finscher (Ed.): Music in Past and Present 2 , Part 1. Basel [u. a.], col. 442.
  8. ^ Cf. W. Frobenius: Art. "Aleatorisch, Aleatorik". In: Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Ed.): Concise dictionary of musical terminology . Stuttgart [u. a.] 1976, p. 7.