DICE MUSIC IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

FROM I757 to I8I2 at least twenty musical dice games were published in Europe, some in several editions and languages. All made it possible for the person ignorant of music to write minuets, marches, polonaises, contredances, waltzes and so forth by selecting bits of prefabricated music through the use of chance operations. These publications are notable in that they offer, two centuries earlier than the twentieth-century 'advent' of aleatory music, methods by which chance-determined music may be composed. Leonard Ratner has written, 'The amusement afforded by these musical games of chance bespeaks pure dilettantism . . .'.1 Rococo attempts at devizing a mechanical means of composition are in accordance with the rationalistic temperament of the time, as shown by the many treatises on music published during this period that include discussions of mathematics. The treatises and criticisms of Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg (I7I8-98) are filled with mathematical analyses of music. More noteworthy is the relating of music to natural sciences that is found in the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Most important, however, was the general public enthusiasm for mathematics. Without the eighteenth century's great interest in mathematics there would have been no incentive for the creation of such unusual means of composition as dice games. Of course, the separation and codification of musical elements that made the dice games feasible were only possible because of the simple and symmetrical nature of Rococo music. A complete list of the musical dice games follows this article, including several works ,which are no longer extant and thus cannot be discussed. Enough survive, however, to demonstrate a curious musical practice. The first of these musical oddities was also the first publication ofJohann Philipp Kirnberger (I 72 I -83), Der allezeitfertige Menuettenund Polonoisenkomponist (Berlin, I 757). Since this publication was to serve as a model for many of the succeeding musical dice games, it will be discussed in more detail than most of the works mentioned in this article. The 'Minuet Composer' allowed the novice to compose either a polonaise, consisting of one six-bar period and one eight-bar period, or a minuet and trio, both eight bars in length. A throw of two dice determined which bar of music would be used next as the I "'Ars combinatoria": Chance and Choice in Eighteenth-century Music', Studies in Eighteenth-century Music: a Tribute to Karl Geiringer on his Seventieth Birthday, ed. H. C. Robbins Landon & Roger Chapman, London, I970, p. 345.