Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Ben Judson <>]

Cage introduced different kinds of bias in the chance operations used for composition, so while there would be a certain range of possible outcomes in each operation, certain outcomes were more likely than others, by design. And I've read that he would sometimes change this bias in different sections of a single piece (I'm sure others on this list would know more about this). Taking the dice analogy, he might use dice weight towards 6 in one section of the piece and weighted toward 2 in another section.

I think this is what he wanted to distinguish from "random," which implies that there is no underlying system. In the same way, if a programmer is being precise he will refer to psuedo-random number generator, since there's no such thing as a "random" number generator -- there's always a system underlying it.

Ben.

On Feb 13, 2013, at 1:49 AM, Stefano Pocci wrote:

By the way, "Alea" in latin means dice (Alea iacta est > the dice has been cast). So if I'm not recalling wrong from statistics, aleatoric refers to chance as applied to a fixed number of possible results (such as the faces of a dice, 6) which theoretically must be equally probable within their 'universe' (that is, the set of the possible values/results). Cage's vision was much broader and blurred, I think, unlike the ideal scientific definition provided in statistics which did not match exactly how things are working in real life. But maybe I'm not too precise and correct on this point.