Feature Request: Aleatory boxes

aleatory is just a way of guiding improvisation, one of the most natural things a musician can do…it can be used well or badly just like every other musical technique

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I don’t see how “aleatory”, strictly speaking, can be anything other than semi-coordinated noise. If it is random, by definition, (correct me if I’m wrong) then it isn’t guiding anything other than, perhaps, timing (or pitch, but not both). Perhaps I’m associating “aleatoric music” too much with empty boxes where people just make their instruments squeal for no good reason.

I agree that most things can be employed well or poorly. But I’ve yet to meet a piece of music where genuine ‘aleatory’ passages was enjoyable. I am happy to be proven wrong, however. And, as an aside, I recognize that this is a matter of personal aesthetics.

Yes of course it is a matter of personal taste, but aleatory is not by definition style-specific. It can be used to make any kind of guided improvisation you want, from “noise” to beautiful chords, and beyond! Here’s an example of a piece that uses aleatory in a way that I find really beautiful. Christopher Cerrone — Can't and Won't [Score Follow Edition] - YouTube (e.g. the section starting at 3:53 ) Of course you may not agree with me that it’s beautiful because we all have different tastes, and that is great! But if you’ve only heard aleatory used to make “instruments squeal for no good reason,” there’s lots of great music out there for you to get to know :smiley:

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Well, so is figured bass.

Just to prove you wrong and, thus, make you happy:

There are myriads of bad uses of indeterminate notation out there (as with any other category of music), but it really isn’t hard to find pieces that are exemplary of the technique’s unique strengths.

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In a way, anything that’s a musician’s responsability is a form of aleatory. How to voice a chord symbol or figured bass, how to fill in a jazz solo, how to add ornaments to a baroque sonata, how long to hold the high C in your cadenza, how to bow and finger a string part, how often to repeat a section.
Although I hardly ever encounter aleatory boxes in the music I deal with normally, I can see why they exist, and how they can be used in creative and compelling ways.

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I used to feel as @Romanos did, but I’ve seen aleatoric music presented in really transcendent ways. I agree, I think it’s more than just a passing fad.

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That is indeed beautiful, but I’d hardly call that aleatoric. It’s essentially unmeasured tremolos. But it is beautiful.

I was more/less just poking fun at truly atonal stuff where everyone is having a free-for-all.

No, it’s not. There’s nothing “aleatoric” about FB. The harmony and rhythm are fully charted; how you place it under your fingers is the only thing up for interpretation.

I almost mentioned In C in my initial post. I’ve actually played that before. Again, this isn’t quite what I meant by “aleatoric”. There is definitely a chance element, however.

I guess I spawned this whole little side-discussion because of a confusion of terms. Aleatory, strictly speaking (at least as I was taught in music school) is literally injecting passages into music where the performer is instructed to do things at random or with complete freedom. Adding trills would hardly qualify as aleatoric in the traditional view. It is merely the human element, for wont of a better term.

This was the sort of thing that I had in mind when I used the term aleatoric: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgkaf8gFoF4
(hence my description of “orchestrating noise” earlier)

well regardless of what each of us defines as “truly aleatoric” or not, there are lots of different types of music in which composers choose to uses boxes to indicate playing out of time, so I hope that this becomes a built in feature in Dorico soon!

(Though i agree with you that i personally would have notated some of that as a tremolo…here’s a better example from the same composer…page 22+ could not have been notated without aleatory) High Windows [Score Follow Edition] - YouTube

I think that there are plenty of film scores that would disprove this statement, including those by John Williams and Howard Shore.

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Oh, I see. You mean like this?

Funnily enough, the video that you link to is a tape piece - pretty much the form with the least amount of indeterminacy possible. There literally is the term “fixed media” for such pieces. And as such, this score couldn’t be further away from the techniques you are presenting it as an example for. (I’ve only skimmed through the video itself and have not seen any indeterminate scoring; certainly not those boxes this thread is about. But even if there was any, it just would be meaningless with a tape piece.)

I know that I am coming across as glib here - and I probably deserve any admonition the community sees fit to give out about that. But, @Romanos, if there is a point to my examples, it is that maybe it could be worthwhile to revisit what you remember from music school. I would claim that, on this topic, you confuse technical terms as well as their underlying meanings.

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Cadenzas have a 200 year history. You are now applying a mid-20th century term meant to describe modern compositional practice to something that it was never intended to describe.

Perhaps so. Perhaps I apply the term too narrowly and you too broadly? It certainly shouldn’t be used as a catch all term to describe baroque and classical music too.

One definition I’ve read (brittanica) states:

Aleatory music , also called chance music , (aleatory from Latin alea , “dice”), 20th-century music in which chance or indeterminate elements are left for the performer to realize. The term is a loose one, describing compositions with strictly demarcated areas for improvisation according to specific directions and also unstructured pieces consisting of vague directives, such as “Play for five minutes.”

I was exposed to the latter examples, while you are describing the former. Perhaps we are both right, in a way.

As I’ve admitted to Alexander, it seems I was applying the term too strictly. (Although I do believe others perhaps apply it too liberally as well.) My exposure to aleatoric music in undergrad was of a particularly disquieting variety, that often sounded no different than Webern at his most eccentric (serialism, another topic into which I’d rather not wade, can certainly tax the soul, even if there are diamonds in the rough). These were the types of pieces where the whole page was black boxes and square chords on pages that clearly took their inspiration from Crumb and failed to resemble traditional western music other than the fact that instruments were in players hands.

You all have made your case that aleatoric music is a much broader (and tonal) term than I realized when I made my first little jab, and I accept defeat, lol.

And to be clear: I’m not against the implementation of tools to facilitate composers’ needs who would like to employ these techniques. Like just about every other request, I’m quite happy for Dorico’s toolbox to get bigger and bigger, even if I don’t use all the tools myself.

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About half a century ago, there was a premier performance of of a sort of composition discussed here at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in NYC, where I was working at the time. The composer described his method of composition, which involved taking a transparency of a road map of Hungary and poking holes through it onto manuscript paper. The composer chose interesting town names at random for poking the holes. The legendarily quick/sharp tongued head usher commented to the composer “I could have sworn it sounded like New Jersey!”, who laughed heartily.

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It’s a matter of taste, but I think that Lutoslawski is one of the easiest-listenable of the recent avant-garde composers. Yet, he made heavy use of aleatoric boxes (and was maybe their inventor).

I find also the Third Piano Sonata by Boulez intriguing. It doesn’t use boxes, but other signs, still giving the player a free choice among a set of options. It’s not only pitches, but full ‘figures’ and even tempi. I wouldn’t pretend it can fit any taste, but it is for sure an incredible piece of musical intelligence.

Boulez also used aleatoric boxes in a Lutoslawskian way in other works. It’s never free improvisation, but a way to create sort of a cloud of notes of a chord-timbre that would make little sense to notate precisely. This type of sound also depends a lot from the room where the place is performed. In the case of a hybrid piece like Répons, it also depends on what the computer is doing.

Paolo

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The Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos devised something similar. He took a photograph or drawing of the outline of a location, overlaid a piece of graph paper, and plotted “pitches” against the outline. He originally meant this as a means to get young people interested in music composition but used the technique in at least two of his own compositions - “New York Skyline” and Symphony #6 “On the Outline of the Mountains of Brazil”.

Here is the finished outline of New York Skyline:

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This reminds me of all the midi picture songs (skip to 3:55)

I see that, and raise you Jacob Collier| Sends A Happy New Year Message To Musicians - YouTube

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That man is a mad genius. It hurts it’s so good.

So what is the best workaround in Dorico to make Aleatoric Boxes? Thanks!