Roll Over Mozart

Roll the dice and a minuet appears. In the eighteenth century, printed games let anyone compose music by throwing dice. Each throw pointed to a numbered measure in a table. A series of throws made a complete piece. It was in the right key and ended with a proper cadence. You needed to know nothing about notation to get there. They were a parlor amusement, and they worked. Roll Over Mozart plays four of those games, following the original tables measure for measure. MOZART The Musikalisches Würfelspiel appeared under his name in Bonn in 1793. It holds a minuet and an English contredanse, each with 176 numbered measures. You throw two dice sixteen times. KIRNBERGER Berlin 1757, the oldest of them all. A minuet and trio thrown with a single die, and a polonaise of 154 measures with two. Kirnberger studied with Johann Sebastian Bach. He recommended his game as a change from cards. STADLER Vienna 1781. A minuet and trio by a Benedictine monk who knew both Mozart and Haydn. Twelve years later the Mozart game took over his number table, figure for figure. C.P.E. BACH Six measures of double counterpoint “without knowing the rules.” Bach tells his joke with a straight face, and the joke works. Any upper voice fits any lower one. HOW THE DICE GAME WORKS Want to see how it works? For Mozart, Stadler and Kirnberger a guided tour lets you throw for yourself, throw by throw. You watch the dice fall. Your throw lights up in the dice table, copied from the print. The chosen measure slides into its place in your piece. At the end you play it back. With C.P.E. Bach you don't throw. You choose the digits yourself, as he intended. First six for the upper voice, then six for the lower. Then you replace one of the two voices and hear what changes. LISTEN AND EXPORT Roll, and you hear the result straight away. Change the instrument and the tempo while the piece is playing. Look at the score of your own throw, measure by measure. Take it with you as sheet music in a PDF, or as a MIDI file for any music program. THE PRINTS Nothing here is generated by a model. Every measure is the composer's own, printed in the eighteenth century. Not a note has been changed. The dice decide the order, exactly as they were meant to. Each composer comes with the story of the print the game appeared in. You see the original dice table and the pages of numbered measures. They are scanned from surviving copies, among them in the British Library, the Bavarian State Library and the Baden State Library, by way of IMSLP. Zoom in with two fingers and read every measure. The literature behind the texts is listed too. FREE AND PAID Mozart is free and complete. You get both games, the score on screen, the PDF, the MIDI export, every instrument and the full tempo range. One single purchase, with no subscription, adds the other three composers. They come with the same score, the same export and the same instruments. That is Kirnberger's minuet and trio and his polonaise, Stadler's minuet and trio, and C.P.E. Bach's double counterpoint. Eleven instruments, from piano and harpsichord to violin, flute and church organ. Tempo from a crawl to a sprint. Seven languages. No account, no advertising, no tracking. It works in airplane mode too.