The full title: aleatoric music - a treatise on compositional techniques and procedures for the practicable realization of indeterminate aural experience.
Aleatoric music is commonly defined as music in which one or more parameters of the composition remained undetermined by the composer; that is, ultimately left for the performer to decide. However, from the viewpoint of the audience, the auditory experience is fully at the determination of the performer, as the average listener has little or no basis for comparison on issues of expression, tuning, tempo, orchestration, mistakes, etc. Outside the realm of rigid integral serialism realized by computational methods. Thus, this definition of aleatory falls short of the artistic goal of various indeterminate musics.
It would therefore be better to define aleatoric music in terms of its opposition to traditional art musics. Whereas traditional art music historically seeks to converge toward the total realization of accurate performamce (oral tradition to notation to serialism, to integral serialism to computer music), aleatoric music seeks to pull back from such determinacy such that a given performance is objectively indeterminate is some way. Yet, at the same time, there must be an opposite boundary, beyond which lies fully indeterminate, chance, chaos, and meta-compositional philosophy.
Furthermore, a piece must have some recognizable identity for the average listener in spite of it's aleatory in order to be "a piece" in the traditional sense. A lack of all coherence between various performances would call the nature of the piece into question, and ultimately lack credibilty as a repeatble performance. Therefore, aleatoric music requires a written or potentially writable score that reliably documents at least 1 "unbreakable rule." That is not to say that failure to obey this rule is anachronistic to a particular piece, but that the rule must be in effect (known to both performer and listener) such that "disobedience," or better failure, are recognizable as such, if desired by either participant.
Several potential procedures come to mind immediately: what i call "music for sight reading" in which the performer must perform at sight some notated score. Such a procedure produces a satisfactory aleatoric experience for the listener by containing only one known unbreakable rule: "attempt to perform this piece of music." Even if not immediately tangible, the listener can accept the presence of consistent source material among various performances. A second category can be defined by the blatant removal of traditional performance instruction: no notated dynamics, articulations, rhythms, pitch, insttumentation, etc.
This is not a new concept, works like Bach's Art of The Fugue are defined by their lack of instrumentation, many of the piano works by Liszt and Chopin (among others) bear the marks of favoring physical/visual observable performative gestures over strict adherence to standard notated articulation. Yet, the distinction must be drawn between these proto-examples and a distinct class of aleatoric music in which the uncertainty is an intended component of the performance.
In order to build such a body of work, a composer may choose to work from small experiments toward larger solo and ensemble works, such that both the works themselves, and the repertoire built from them form an aleatoric evolution with the composer as the only unifying force. Or multiple works may take the same predetermined material as the starting point for radically different performance settings. In any case, the overreaching goal would be a more engaged audience for both live performance and recoded media. Such a project may very well help to reinvigorate the financial and creative support we as artist frequently lack.
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