Throw Snake Eyes, Write a Symphony

Just because Mozart is dead doesn’t mean he can’t help you write a minuet.

If you have access to the Internet and your computer is equipped to play electronic MIDI music (most home computers sold these days come with the appropriate sound hardware already installed), you can play a little game devised by Mozart in 1787 that will result in the creation of a 16-bar minuet.

You can then blast your minuet from computer speakers to share your composition with the world, or play it through headphones if you’re at work and don’t want your employer to know you are creating 18th century dance pieces at your desk.

Mozart called the game “Musikalisches Wurfelspiel,” which translates as “Musical dice game.” Each throw of dice has 11 possible outcomes, so he wrote 11 different snatches of music for each of 14 measures in a 16 measure minuet. For the other two--the eighth and 16th bars--he wrote only two possible choices, for musical reasons.

Adding them all up, Mozart wrote 158 different measures of music for the game.

The player throws dice 16 times, once for each measure, to choose which music will be used. Then all the choices are strung together to make a short piece that can be performed in about a minute.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Joseph Haydn both created similar amusements, but it was Mozart’s that became best known. (Mozart’s game was published in 1793, two years after his death.) A couple centuries later, “chance music,” as compositions devised through random choices came to be known, became the primary force behind the work of John Cage.

A couple of Internet denizens realized the possibilities for adapting “Musikalisches Wurfelspiel” for the Web. John Chuang, who has a cool site that links to several clever games he and others devised, houses his Mozart page at https://204.96.11.210/jchuang/Music/Mozart/mozart.cgi.

Once there, you can create your minuet in three ways. The easiest is to let the computer automatically “throw the dice” (think of it as the musical version of a lottery “Quick Pick” ticket). You can manually type in dice roll results. And you can let a complex fractal generator not only choose your numbers, but also create a colorful, abstract graphic based on the dice rolls that come up.

Then, you choose the instruments your minuet will be played upon. The default is the sound of an acoustic piano, but assuming your computer software can handle the wide range of MIDI sounds now available, you get 128 choices, ranging from harpsichord to helicopter. (At one point I chose helicopter for the left hand of the keyboard and gunshot for the right, resulting in a music track that would not sound out of place on a rap station.)

Finally, you click on the “Make Music!” button, and your minuet is played. Click on another button and you can print out the score.

You can be reasonably assured your little minuet is unique. On a site based in Holland--https://www.cs.vu.nl/~zsofi/mozart--music educator Zsofia Ruttkay writes that the number of different compositions that can be devised from the game exceeds the total number of people on Earth. If played one-by-one at a quick pace of 30 seconds each, it would take more than 1.4 billion years to perform all the variations.

That’s a long time, but hey, it’s Mozart. Here’s hoping no one ever devises the ABBA dice game.

*

Cyburbia’s e-mail address is david.colker@latimes.com.