Musical Dice Games and the Long History of Interactive Music

It is easy to think of interactive music as a product of game engines and phones. The core idea is much older: write music in pieces that fit together, then let something other than the composer decide the order.

That something has been dice, a book of Chinese oracles, a performer's eye, or a listener. This article follows the idea from the eighteenth century to the 1960s. For the modern descendants, see our short history of interactive albums and music apps.

The dice games of the 1700s

A Musikalisches Würfelspiel, or musical dice game, was a system for generating music from precomposed options. Wikipedia's overview notes the games were popular across Western Europe in the eighteenth century. It names Johann Kirnberger's "The Ever-Ready Minuet and Polonaise Composer" (1757) as the earliest known example, and C.P.E. Bach published a related method for writing counterpoint "without knowing the rules" in 1758.

The idea was practical. A person with no training could roll dice, look up bars in a table, and end up with a correct little dance.

The Mozart game, and a caution

The best-known example was published in the early 1790s by Mozart's publisher, Nikolaus Simrock in Berlin, with Mozart's name on the cover. Whether Mozart really wrote it is debated. The Mozart catalog lists it as K. 516f, and IMSLP files it under aleatoric music, while Wikipedia says the attribution has not been authenticated.

Faber Music describes the game as using the throw of the dice "to determine the order of 176 bars of given musical material." In the version described by Wikipedia, a player rolls two dice sixteen times, and each roll selects one of eleven interchangeable versions of a bar. The result is a minuet, and the number of possible minuets runs past 759 trillion.

Notice what makes it work. Every alternative bar was written to fit with every neighbor. The dice are the easy part; the careful composing happens before anyone rolls.

Cage: chance at the desk

John Cage's Music of Changes (1951) used chance too, but in a different place. Wise Music, which represents the work, says Cage used I Ching-derived chance operations to build charts for tempi, dynamics, sounds and silences, durations and superimpositions.

Then the score was fully notated. Every performance of the 43-minute piece is the same. Chance shaped the composing, not the listening.

Stockhausen and Riley: chance on stage

Other composers moved the choice into the performance. Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI, as Piano Street describes it, is a single large page with 19 groups of notes, "the order of which is decided during the performance." The pianist starts wherever the eye falls and ends when a group has been played a third time. At the end of each group the score notes the tempo, touch and dynamics for whichever group the pianist picks next.

That detail matters. The piece does not just allow choices. It prepares for them, so any path through it sounds intended.

Terry Riley's In C (1964) gives an ensemble 53 short sequences. According to Wikipedia's entry on indeterminacy, players repeat each sequence as long as they like before moving on. Every performance differs, but the overall course stays fixed.

Three places a choice can live

Looking across these works, a pattern appears. A choice can be made at one of three moments:

• While composing, as in the dice games and Music of Changes. The result is fixed, and the listener hears one version.
• While performing, as in Klavierstück XI and In C. The audience hears a version nobody can repeat exactly.
• While listening, as in modern games and apps. The person hearing the music decides, or their situation does.

What the old pieces still teach

John Cage described indeterminacy as "the ability of a piece to be performed in substantially different ways," in the words Wikipedia quotes. Every historical example above meets that test, and every one depends on design before flexibility. The parts share a key, a tempo and a structure, so none of them can collide.

That is the same discipline behind designing a song so it can adapt. A song that can be heard in several finished production styles still needs one strong melody, one clear structure and honest writing underneath. The variety comes from what is built on top.

A closer look at how the dice become a rule

Two dice add up to a number from 2 to 12, which gives eleven possible results. That is why the Mozart game offers eleven versions of each bar. Each total points to one alternative in a table.

The totals are not equally likely. A seven comes up more often than a two or a twelve, so some alternatives sound more often than others. A clever composer could have used that, putting the most characteristic version of a bar where the middle numbers fall.

The listener sees none of this. They hear a short dance that sounds composed, because the composing really was done, just earlier and for many futures at once.

What the player gained, and what the listener lost

The dice games gave an amateur a feeling of authorship. You could produce music without training, and every minuet felt like yours. That is a real pleasure, and it is part of why such games were popular.

The listener, however, could not steer. Once the dice were rolled, the piece was fixed. Stockhausen and Riley gave choice to the performer, and games and apps eventually gave it to the person hearing the music.

Each step moved the decision closer to the audience. That journey from composer to listener is the thread running through the history of interactive music, and it is not finished.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Musikalisches Würfelspiel
• IMSLP: Musikalisches Würfelspiel, K.516f (Mozart))
• Faber Music: To Compose Without the Least Knowledge of Music (Colin Matthews)
• Wise Music Classical: Music of Changes (John Cage)
• Piano Street: Ear-opening explorations, Sabine Liebner plays Stockhausen's solo piano music
• Wikipedia: Indeterminacy (music))