Taking a Chance with the Music:
Mozart's Dice Game
In 1787, the same year he wrote his
opera "Don Giovanni" and a couple dozen other
masterpieces, Mozart took some time out for a little
parlor game. He wrote nearly 300 measures of music for a
little minuet. But this was only the raw material: In
order to figure out which measures would actually make
the cut, and in which order, the composer had to roll
dice, and for each number rolled, there was a
corresponding measure of music. Anybody could "write"
music under this scheme.
Mozart didn't surrender his will
entirely. There is a specific, set number of measures
for the entire composition (16 in the minuet, for
example, and 16 in the accompanying trio, a contrasting
section which was customary before returning to the
minuet itself). Each measure has to be "rolled" in
sequence, and has its own column of possibilities. This
way, the "grammar" of the piece is still preserved. For
example, each sentence in English needs a verb in order
to be complete. If Mozart's game were to allow you to
compose sentences rather than minuets, the first column
would feature a bunch of nouns; then when it was time
for the verb, you would only be able to choose from a
list of verbs. The next roll would feature a list of
direct objects. That way, the sentence would always make
some kind of grammatical sense, and none of the
necessary elements would be missing. In Mozart's case,
the important thing for a minuet to do is to move from
the tonic to the dominant and then back again, and that
is carefully controlled by making every possible measure
do the same thing musically at each of the important
structural points, even though the surface possibilities
for how you do it are quite varied. There may be 300
measures, but, at any point in time, you are only
allowed 11 choices, and they exist only for a particular
measure (say, measure 5 has these 11, and
measure 6 has these other 11, and so on).
But, one imagines, part of the fun
will be in coming up with silly combinations, much like
those children's books where each picture of an animal
is divided into three independent parts and by flipping
those parts of pages individually you can wind up with
the head of an alligator on the body of a giraffe.
When I taught this game one year to my
piano students, before composing minutes, we had fun
rolling the dice to create silly sentences from my list
of articles, nouns, verbs, and so on, such as "the
banana went to the store" or "the toothbrush had a
picnic." On a structural level, these make sense. They
employ the appropriate parts of speech in the correct
places. But they are plainly nuts. This is the kind of
silly Mozart enjoyed, and his game is a useful way to
understand musical architecture while being absurd at
the same time.
It was probably also a nice respite
for Mozart from having to make all of those important
compositional decisions. In the 20th century, some
composers made a philosophy out of divorcing their will
from the compositional process. John Cage often composed
by throwing dice and notating the results (with far less
control over the output). Mozart would never have
considered such a possibility. But he loved to have a
little fun.
There are scads of pages devoted to
this game on the web. I've listed only a few. Some of
them enable you to actually play the game yourself with
a few clicks of your mouse.
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When I first
wrote this article 500 years ago, you couldn't get the
score of this piece free on the International Score
Library Project. Now you can.
Here.
http://donaldsauter.com/mozart-dice-game.htm This is just a fun read.
And if you are into (ancient) computer programming,
you can help yourself to code that will allow you to
recreate the game without the need to roll actual
dice.
Mozart's Musikalisches
W�rfelspiel John
Chuang's site allows you to listen to all 272 measures
of Mozart's original (although there is no musical
notation involved) and has links to other sites.
Mozart Dice Game
Most of the sites I've found are
interested in the math involved, or the programming.
This site shows you the computer programming code
involved in creating the kind of games seen above.
That none of these sites were created
by (historically aware) musicians is evident from the
musical errors throughout. The last site in particular
insists on referring to Mozart's minuet as a waltz.
Apparently, this error can be traced back to the
original publisher, who probably figured the average
non-Royal customer wouldn't want something known as a
"Minuet," that old-fashioned dance the fancy-pants
royalty used to do. None of the above sites takes the
customary repeat of each half of the minuet before going
on, which changes the overall effect as well.
Mozart Interactive The most visually appealing version
of the game although the translated instructions do
not make much sense. You can see the die being cast
and the actual measures being assembled from the
available choices. You'll have to wait until all the
measures for the minuet section (no trio here, either)
have been assembled in order to download the results,
something I haven't yet been able to do successfully
due to "internal configuration errors," which is a bit
disappointing.
Math Trek: Mozart's Melody
Machine, Science News Online, Sept. 1, 2001 a great resource with many links for
those wanting information from a variety of angles.
Mozart's Musical Dice Game from Carousel Publications Ltd Musicians and
educators...Wondering how to get a hold of the
actual game? For 20 bucks you can own the score, the
instructions, and a pair of dice. Not surprisingly,
the publisher's site is quite certain that Mozart
really composed this game, despite the doubts of
many others. Most people waffle, suggesting that
there is no real evidence that Mozart actually
authored the game, but then stating that "no real
objections" have come forth from musicologists.
In an accompanying essay, A Dr. Willis Wager states with
certainty a number of things that he doesn't
trouble himself to back up with source material,
including this gem:
"Mozart was still fairly early in
his career and not quite so widely known as he was
to be later."
In 1787? He died in 1791! How early are we talking
about here? And he claims it is listed in the
Koechel catalogue of Mozart's works as 516f, which
DOES date it to 1787, but so far (and I've only seen
an online copy of the catalogue) I haven't been able
to find any entry for a 516f. hmmmm.....
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