Forum week 3

This weeks Forum was some what of an introduction to aleatory or chance music which was presented by David Harris. The students in the forum were all given parts in a forty-five minute performance, these parts consisted of keyboard parts, singing parts, spoken parts, guitar parts and finally percussion parts. The students were all given a copy of the content of there own particular parts, these content sheets rather than being in metered time consisted of a time frame in which they were to perform their parts eg. in my example for a spoken part, the line/s were given, then a indication of when to recite the line ie. 2.00(minutes) to 3.30(minutes). This was done for all parts and meant that while content and a rough indication of time was given, the final result of how the piece sounded would also depend on the performers or as is state on Wikipedia (2007), "aleatoric processes which have been fixed in their outline but the details of which are left to chance".
While a lot is left to chance, as stated above, from this performance I could see that certain facets other than the content could be influenced by the composer especially in regards to crescendos and diminuendos ie: if several parts were given the same 10-15 second interval where they were to perform their part, most likely a crescendo effect would occur, where as if there was a period where all parts had an interval of say 3 minutes there may, at some time during this period be areas of silence or diminuendo.
All in all I think it would have been interesting to maybe have a shorter performance that was recorded, then played back to the students in the second half of the forum for a kind of informal analysis.