So much this. The postwar period was more than a little insane - a combination of bureaucracy, technocracy, and competitive academic over-intellectualisation. Academic music mirrored all of this.
But the aesthetics date back to a 19th century music theorist called Hanslick who was aggressively against emotional expression in music. (He literally said women are too emotional to be good composers.)
Postwar academic composers fell in love with this idea, and the result was a torrent of abrasively pretentious tuneless nonsense, most of which was forgotten almost immediately after being written.
That's where most aleatoric music lives. It's not as clever or interesting as it pretends to be. There's nothing outstandingly effective about using dice or radio channels or the I Ching or whatever to spray notes and sounds around.
In C is a bit different because the randomness is limited to selecting and playing entire phrases that (mostly) fit together. It's a much older, less extreme, and more accessible version that isn't too random because of the phrase content.
But the aesthetics date back to a 19th century music theorist called Hanslick who was aggressively against emotional expression in music. (He literally said women are too emotional to be good composers.)
Postwar academic composers fell in love with this idea, and the result was a torrent of abrasively pretentious tuneless nonsense, most of which was forgotten almost immediately after being written.
That's where most aleatoric music lives. It's not as clever or interesting as it pretends to be. There's nothing outstandingly effective about using dice or radio channels or the I Ching or whatever to spray notes and sounds around.
In C is a bit different because the randomness is limited to selecting and playing entire phrases that (mostly) fit together. It's a much older, less extreme, and more accessible version that isn't too random because of the phrase content.