Indeterminacy is a composing approach in which some aspects of a musical work are left open to chance or to the interpreter's free choice.
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...
, a pioneer of indeterminacy, defined it as "the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways".
The earliest significant use of music indeterminacy features is found in many of the compositions of American composer
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives (; October 20, 1874May 19, 1954) was an American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed f ...
in the early 20th century.
Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher and teacher. Marchioni, Tonimarie (2012)"Henry Cowell: A Life Stranger Than Fiction" ''The Juilliard Journal''. Retrieved 19 June 202 ...
adopted Ives's ideas during the 1930s, in works allowing players to arrange the fragments of music in a number of different possible sequences. Beginning in the early 1950s, the term came to refer to the (mostly American) movement which grew up around Cage. This group included the other members of the
New York School. In Europe, following the introduction of the expression "
aleatory music
Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word ''alea'', meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the ...
" by
Werner Meyer-Eppler
Werner Meyer-Eppler (30 April 1913 – 8 July 1960), was a Belgian-born German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist and information theorist.
Meyer-Eppler was born in Antwerp. He studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, fir ...
, the French composer
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music.
Born in Mont ...
was largely responsible for popularizing the term.
Definition
Describing indeterminacy, composer John Cage said: "My intention is to let things be themselves." Cage initially defined indeterminacy as "the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways". Bryan Simms thus conflates indeterminacy with what Cage called chance composition when he claims that "Any part of a musical work is indeterminate if it is chosen by chance, or if its performance is not precisely specified. The former case is called 'indeterminacy of composition'; the latter is called 'indeterminacy of performance'."
History
The earliest significant use of music indeterminacy features is found in many of the compositions of American composer
Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives (; October 20, 1874May 19, 1954) was an American modernist composer, one of the first American composers of international renown. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed f ...
in the early 20th century.
Henry Cowell
Henry Dixon Cowell (; March 11, 1897 – December 10, 1965) was an American composer, writer, pianist, publisher and teacher. Marchioni, Tonimarie (2012)"Henry Cowell: A Life Stranger Than Fiction" ''The Juilliard Journal''. Retrieved 19 June 202 ...
adopted Ives's ideas during the 1930s, in such works as the ''Mosaic Quartet'' (String Quartet No. 3, 1934), which allows the players to arrange the fragments of music in a number of different possible sequences. 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.''
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading fi ...
is regarded as a pioneer of indeterminacy in music. Beginning in the early 1950s, the term came to refer to the (mostly American) movement which grew up around Cage. This group included the other members of the so-called
New York School:
Earle Brown
Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of "open form," a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since ...
,
Morton Feldman
Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School ...
and
Christian Wolff. Others working in this way included the
Scratch Orchestra
The Scratch Orchestra was an experimental musical ensemble founded in the spring of 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton.
In the draft constitution published in the ''Musical Times'' of June 1969, Cardew defines a scra ...
in the United Kingdom (1968 until the early 1970s) and the Japanese composer
Toshi Ichiyanagi
was a Japanese avant-garde composer and pianist. One of the leading composers in Japan during the postwar era, Ichiyanagi worked in a range of genres, composing Western-style operas and orchestral and chamber works, as well as compositions using ...
(born 1933). In Europe, following the introduction of the expression "
aleatory music
Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word ''alea'', meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the ...
" by
Werner Meyer-Eppler
Werner Meyer-Eppler (30 April 1913 – 8 July 1960), was a Belgian-born German physicist, experimental acoustician, phoneticist and information theorist.
Meyer-Eppler was born in Antwerp. He studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry, fir ...
, the French composer
Pierre Boulez
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music.
Born in Mont ...
was largely responsible for popularizing the term.
In 1958 Cage gave two lectures in Europe, the first at Darmstadt, titled simply "Indeterminacy", the second in Brussels called "Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music" (given again in an expanded form in 1959 at Teacher's College, Columbia). This second lecture consisted of a number of short stories (originally 30, expanded to ninety in the second version), each story read by Cage in exactly one minute; because of this time limit, the speed of Cage's delivery varied enormously. The second performance and a subsequent recording contained music, also by Cage, played by
David Tudor
David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.
Life and career
Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan ...
at the same time. Subsequently, Cage added still more stories, and published a selection of them, partly as an article, "Indeterminacy", and partly as scattered interludes throughout his first collection of writings, ''Silence''.
Between 2007 and 2013, the Dutch artist Iebele Abel developed an electronic instrument called ''Real-time Indeterminate Synthetic Music Feedback'' (RT-ISMF). The instrument was designed for empirical research on subjective experiences induced by real-time synthesized music, based on the output of electronic random number generators. The basic idea of this approach was that indeterminate music might evoke unique and exceptional human experience.
Classification
Indeterminate or chance music can be divided into three groups: (1) the use of random procedures to produce a determinate, fixed score, (2) mobile form, and (3) indeterminate notation, including graphic notation and texts. The first group includes scores in which the chance element is involved only in the process of composition, so that every parameter is fixed before their performance. In John Cage's ''
Music of Changes
''Music of Changes'' is a piece for solo piano by John Cage. Composed in 1951 for pianist and friend David Tudor, it is a ground-breaking piece of indeterminate music. The process of composition involved applying decisions made using the ''I Ching ...
'' (1951), the process of composition involved applying decisions made using the ''
I Ching
The ''I Ching'' or ''Yi Jing'' (, ), usually translated ''Book of Changes'' or ''Classic of Changes'', is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zho ...
'', a Chinese classic text that is commonly used as a divination system. The ''I Ching'' was applied to large charts of sounds, durations, dynamics, tempo and densities. Cage himself, however, regarded ''Music of Changes'' as a determinate work, because it is completely fixed from one performance to another.
Iannis Xenakis
Giannis Klearchou Xenakis (also spelled for professional purposes as Yannis or Iannis Xenakis; el, Γιάννης "Ιωάννης" Κλέαρχου Ξενάκης, ; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde ...
used probability theories to define some microscopic aspects of ''
Pithoprakta
''Pithoprakta'' (1955–56) is a piece by Iannis Xenakis for string orchestra (with 46 separate solo parts), two trombones, xylophone, and Woodblock (instrument), wood block, premièred by conductor Hermann Scherchen in Munich in March 1957. A typ ...
'' (1955–56), that is the Greek for "actions by means of probability". This work contains four sections, characterized by textural and timbral attributes, such as glissandi and pizzicati. At the macroscopic level, the sections are designed and controlled by the composer, but the single components of sound are generated by mathematical theories. See:
stochastic music
Stochastic (, ) refers to the property of being well described by a random probability distribution. Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselv ...
.
In the second type of indeterminate music (the only type of indeterminate music according to Cage's definition), chance elements involve the performance. Notated events are provided by the composer, but their arrangement is left to the determination of the performer. According to Cage, examples include
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the '' Brandenburg Concertos''; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard w ...
's ''
The Art of Fugue
''The Art of Fugue'', or ''The Art of the Fugue'' (german: Die Kunst der Fuge, links=no), BWV 1080, is an incomplete musical work of unspecified instrumentation by Johann Sebastian Bach. Written in the last decade of his life, ''The Art of Fug ...
'', Morton Feldman's ''Intersection 3'', Earle Brown's ''Four Systems'', and Christian Wolff's ''Duo for Pianists II''. A form of limited indeterminacy was used by
Witold Lutosławski
Witold Roman Lutosławski (; 25 January 1913 – 7 February 1994) was a Polish composer and conductor. Among the major composers of 20th-century classical music, he is "generally regarded as the most significant Polish composer since Szyman ...
(beginning with ''
Jeux vénitiens
''Jeux vénitiens'' (French for ''Venetian Games'') is a 1961 composition by Polish people, Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, under commission from the Krakow Philharmonic. It premiered April 21, 1961 in Venice. Another performance occurred at ...
'' in 1960–61), 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. Earle Brown's ''Twenty-Five Pages'', uses 25 unbound pages, and called for anywhere between one and 25 pianists. The score allowed the performers to arrange the pages in whatever order they saw fit. Also, the pages were notated symmetrically and without clefs so that the top and bottom orientation is reversible.
"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.
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati ( he, רוֹמן האובּנשׁטוֹק-רָמָתִי; 27 February 1919 – 3 March 1994) was a composer and music editor who worked in Kraków, Tel Aviv and Vienna.
Life
Haubenstock-Ramati was born in Kraków. He stud ...
composed a series of influential "mobiles" such as ''Interpolation'' (1958).
However, "open form" in music is also used in the sense defined by the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1915) to mean a work which is fundamentally incomplete, represents an unfinished activity, or points outside of itself. In this sense, a "mobile form" can be either "open" or "closed". An example of a "dynamic, closed" mobile musical composition is
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groun ...
's ''
Zyklus
''Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger'' (English: Cycle for a Percussionist) is a composition by Karlheinz Stockhausen, assigned Number 9 in the composer's catalog of works. It was composed in 1959 at the request of Wolfgang Steinecke as a test piece ...
'' (1959),
Terry Riley
Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley (born June 24, 1935) is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his music became notable for it ...
's ''
In C
''In C'' is a musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964 for an indefinite number of performers. He suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work". A series of short melodic fragments, ''In C'' is o ...
'' (1964) was composed of 53 short sequences; each member of the ensemble can repeat a given sequence as many times as desired before going on to the next, making the details of each performance of ''In C'' unique. However, because the overall course is fixed, it is a closed form.
The greatest degree of indeterminacy is reached by the third type of indeterminate music, in
graphic score pieces, in which the music is represented using symbols and illustrations suggesting how a work can be performed. Hans-Christoph Steiner's score for ''Solitude'', created using Pure Data's data structures. This notation may be, like music on traditional staves, a time-pitch graph system.
Earle Brown
Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of "open form," a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since ...
's ''December 1952'' consists purely of horizontal and vertical lines varying in width, spread out over the page; it is a landmark piece in the history of graphic notation of music. The role of the performer is to interpret the score visually and translate the graphical information to music. In Brown's notes on the work he even suggests that one consider this 2D space as 3D and imagine moving through it.
Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew (7 May 193613 December 1981) was an English experimental music composer, and founder (with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, ...
's ''
Treatise
A treatise is a formal and systematic written discourse on some subject, generally longer and treating it in greater depth than an essay, and more concerned with investigating or exposing the principles of the subject and its conclusions."Treat ...
'' is a graphic musical score comprising 193 pages of lines, symbols, and various geometric or abstract shapes that generally eschew conventional musical notation. Although the score allows for absolute interpretive freedom (no one interpretation will sound like another), the work is not normally played spontaneously, as Cardew had previously suggested that performers devise in advance their own rules and methods for interpreting and performing the work. There are, however, infinite possibilities for the interpretation of ''Treatise'' that fall within the implications of the piece and general principles of experimental music performance in the late 1960s, including presentation as visual art and map-reading
Discography
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See also
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Process music
Process music is music that arises from a process. It may make that process audible to the listener, or the process may be concealed.
Primarily begun in the 1960s, diverse composers have employed divergent methods and styles of process. "A 'music ...
References
Sources
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Further reading
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Childs, Barney. 1974. "Indeterminacy". ''Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Music'', edited by John Vinton. London: Thames and Hudson. American edition published under title ''Dictionary of Contemporary Music'' (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974) .
*
Griffiths, Paul. 2001. "Aleatory". ''
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theo ...
'', second edition, edited by
Stanley Sadie
Stanley John Sadie (; 30 October 1930 – 21 March 2005) was an influential and prolific British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the '' Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' (1980), which was publ ...
and
John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.
*
Nyman, Michael. 1974. ''Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond''. London: Studio Vista; New York: Schirmer Books. Second edition 1999, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. (cloth) (pbk).
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Roig-Francolí, Miguel A. 2008. ''Understanding Post-Tonal Music''. Boston: McGraw-Hill. .
* Sutherland, Roger. 1994. ''New Perspectives in Music''. London: Sun Tavern Fields. .
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Experimental music
Musical composition