Indeterminacy in music, which began with experimental music composer John Cage in 1958^{[citation needed]}, came to refer to the (mostly American) movement which grew up around him. This group included the other members of the so-called New York school: Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff. Others working in this way included The Scratch Orchestra in the United Kingdom (1968 until the early 1970s) and the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (b. 1933). For experimental rock music, see experimental rock. ... For the Mortal Kombat character, see Johnny Cage. ... Year 1958 (MCMLVIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer. ... Morton Feldman (January 12, 1926 – September 3, 1987) was an American composer, born in New York City. ... Christian Wolff is the name of at least two notable individuals: an eighteenth-century philosopher and mathematician - see Christian Wolff (philosopher) a twentieth_century composer _ see Christian Wolff (composer) a German actor This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the... Toshi Ichiyanagi (一柳 æ…§ Ichiyanagi Toshi, born 4 February 1933, Kobe, Japan) is a Japanese composer of avant-garde music. ...

In 1958 Cage gave a lecture in Brussels called "Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music" (given again in 1959 at Teacher's College, Columbia). The lecture consisted of a number of short stories read by Cage in exactly one minute; because of this time limit the speed of Cage's delivery varied enormously. The second performance and a subsequent recording^[1] contained music, also by Cage, played by David Tudor at the same time. David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 - August 13, 1996) was a pianist and composer of experimental music. ...

One strand of indeterminacy in music sees it as an aesthetic endeavour that strives to dissolve any fixed properties of music sound into a fluid process and do away with the traditional control of the composer over the material. In its most radical form, all sounds have equal value: sounds chosen by the composer, by the performer, and all the unforeseen and unpredictable sounds that surround us every day. Indeterminacy in this view is philosophically opposed to aleatoric music: there the indeterminate element was kept under careful control by the composer, usually by offering the performers a limited number of possibilities to choose from. Aleatoric (or aleatory) music or composition, is music where some element of the composition is left to chance. ...

References

Cage, John: "Indeterminacy", in Silence (1961, Cambridge, Mass.)

Childs, Barney: "Indeterminacy", in Vinton (ed.): Dictionary of Twentieth-Century music (London 1971, 1974)

Nyman, Michael: Experimental Music. Cage and beyond. London 1971 (repr.1999, Cambridge University Press)

Sutherland, Roger: New Perspectives in Music (London, Sun Tavern Fields, 1994)