text: Early precedents Compositions that could be considered a precedent for aleatory composition date back to at least the late 15th century, with the genre of the catholicon, exemplified by the Missa cuiusvis toni of Johannes Ockeghem. A later genre was the Musikalisches Würfelspiel or musical dice game, popular in the late 18th and early 19th century. (Such dice games are attributed to Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.) These games consisted of a sequence of musical measures, for which each measure had several possible versions and a procedure for selecting the precise sequence based on the throwing of a number of dice.
  The French artist Marcel Duchamp composed two pieces between 1913 and 1915 based on chance operations. One of these, Erratum Musical written with Duchamp's sisters Yvonne and Magdeleine for three voices, was first performed at the Manifestation of Dada on 27 March 1920, and was eventually published in 1934. Two of his contemporaries, Francis Picabia and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, also experimented with chance composition, these works being performed at a Festival Dada staged at the Salle Gaveau concert hall, Paris, on 26 May 1920. American composer John Cage's Music of Changes (1951) was "the first composition to be largely determined by random procedures", though his indeterminacy is of a different order from Meyer-Eppler's concept. Cage later asked Duchamp: "How is it that you used chance operations when I was just being born?"