Johann Philipp Kirnberger’s Musical Dice Game

Known as Musikalisches Würfelspiel (“musical dice game”), this method first published by Johann Philipp Kirnberger was a monumental event in the history of art and chance. The game was a musical composition technique in which pre-composed measures were selected by rolls of dice. Serving as one of the earliest examples of aleatoric (chance) music, it stands as one of the earliest examples generally of art generated randomly by chance. Many subsequent, famous composers would experiment with musikalisches würfelspiel, including C.P.E. Bach and, by attribution, Mozart, who is still the most known practitioner. Musikalisches würfelspiel also begin the tradition of generative music developing prior to graphics, which continued into the twentieth century with Max Mathews at Bell Labs developing MUSIC I nearly a decade before computer graphics were exhibited as art.