Today we started our experiment with chance music.
In chance music (also called aleatory/aleatoric music), some element of the composition and/or the performance of the piece is left to chance.
For a starting piece, we made a simple system which is a list of musical notes that are picked based on our birth months. There are 12 different notes in a chromatic scale and 12 months in a year, so we numbered the 12 notes then picked everyone’s birth month number notes. Then the performers (2 people this time) played their instruments using this list of notes. The performers were composing a piece as they played together, only using those picked notes, and all the rest of elements of music including rhythms, range of the notes, duration of the notes, space between notes, dynamics, mood of the music.. etc. were completely up to the performers.
Then we each made a graphic music score (a graphic score is a score that’s not only written in modern musical notation). There was no rules or directions to make these scores, except they were made on a piece of paper, and they were for musical pieces. Things we used to make graphic scores included drawings, words, numbers, maps, and scraps of pictures from a magazine.
Rolling dice to pick notes
Then we had a curious performance of the pieces we just made.
Performed by: Liam & Malachy H. [audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/aidens.mp3|titles=aiden’s]
“A map for a conversation of 2 people” by David Lee
watch?v=HK-H10nx0u0&feature=youtu.be
Sakiko also brought in a 4-track recorder, and we took turns recording ourselves (creating multi-track compositions). Here’s a photo of us working together on a track:
