LO – 02 – Alexander Chen

In 1757, Johann Philipp Kirnberger wrote a piece based on the randomness of dice. This system, called Musikalisches Würfelspiel, used the values of dice in coordination with preassigned options to compose a piece. The result, “Der allezeit fertige Menuetten- und Polonaise Komponist,” is one of the earliest forms of this type of music.

I admire the fact that this type of generative art (music in this case) is not only something that’s relevant today but also something that’s been around for almost 300 years. Even though this is a very simple and arguably outdated, way of doing generative art, it still qualifies and obviously has stood the test of time.

The artist’s creativity still shines through this otherwise seemingly systematic way of writing music. This is because the preassigned options are still determined by the composer.