Musical dice game
An aleatoric composition through a roll of dice.
What it means
Musical dice game is the name for an eighteenth-century procedure in which a piece is assembled from prefabricated bars: for every bar position, several interchangeable possibilities stand ready, and a die decides which is chosen. The result is a proper minuet or another dance movement. For every combination to work, all the building blocks of a position are built to be harmonically equivalent.
Musical use
Such instructions appeared in print and were addressed to amateurs who wanted to compose without knowledge. Musically they are instructive, because they show how strongly the music of this period is carried by models: because the harmonic progression of a period is fixed, individual bars are interchangeable without the passage falling apart. The procedure is not a forerunner of twentieth-century aleatoric music in the proper sense, for that is concerned with openness of form and with changed ideas of work and performance, not with a game of prefabricated building blocks within a fixed frame. The best-known instruction of this kind was published in 1792 in Berlin under Mozart's name; its authenticity is not documented. Kirnberger's treatise of 1757 bears the title Der allezeit fertige Polonoisen- und Menuettencomponist.
Performance practice
Whoever wants to perform such a piece rolls the dice for the version, writes it out in full, and then treats it like any other minuet — with a dance character, clear articulation, and clean phrasing. Check in the process whether the transitions between the chosen bars carry musically; small adjustments in articulation help. Explain the procedure in the programme, because the manner of its creation belongs to the appeal of the piece.
The instructions often contained tables in which every dice result was assigned a bar. Whoever recognizes this understands the role of models in this music better than through any rule. Such games were also attributed to Haydn and C. P. E. Bach. The method counts as a forerunner of algorithmic composition.
Check whether the instructions contain tables for several bars, and write out the rolled version in full.