I got a minute it, and it mostly reminded me of a fugue.
There's some kind of draw in the hyper-academic avant-garde-ish arts scene that seems to produce mostly forgettable rubbish. But if you take into account that "90% of everything is crap" then there seems to be (slowly) some interesting art trends emerging. American musical minimalism is something I came across only in my thirties, somehow completely oblivious to it as a movement even though I was familiar with a few notable composers like Philip Glass. Once I dove into it, I found it fantastic, joyful, energetic, and most importantly impactful.
I think the composer I found that most reflects our observation here is Steve Reich, who's early work is semi-interesting academic avant-garde-ish naval gazing. But he eventually finds a real voice and his later works are mesmerizing energetic journeys -- and he's had deep impact on modern music across a number of genres.
They've given me hope that I'll find similar artists in other fields that are producing novel, interesting, and ultimately beautiful and impactful work.
For example: Music for Airports is built from very long tape loops with different durations. It's completely deterministic, but the results sound like a random-ish stream of constantly changing note patterns.
It only works because no human has a long enough memory to hear the loops as loops. If our short term memories could hold a long loop as a percept we'd have a very different and less interesting listening experience.
Relatedly, Omri Coen has an interesting video showing his creative process while creating generative music using VCV Rack:
On top of that the people making something will often find different aspects interesting than the people consuming something. Musicians have different ears when listening because they have listened much more focused to potentially much more music. Just like a programmer can find value in someones weird experimental github repo that seems like a waste of time to the layperson, musicians can find value in music and sounds the typical music consumer finds actively horrible.
Let's not forget the avantgarde is about trying new things out. And those attempts are bound to fail a lot of the times. The professional or academic world might be interested in those attempts. Film students might find interesting ideas in obscure european film makers etc. This is normal, they look for something else in films than someone who seeks some entertainment after work.
Yeah, I didn't go into it as optimistic as you, but I remember thinking about Ligeti's "microtonal fugue" music: that just sounds like a swarm of depressed bees. At best it works as a one-off joke.
But then it felt like they were unaware and indifferent to each other's gimmicks as well. Feels like I've heard "striking a tamtam then quickly dipping it in water" (boinng!) from an awful lot of "original" modernist composers .
I agree that American minimalism is the main part of conservatory-guarded prestige music where there's actually something interesting - although it, too, started in some dubious and awfully arrogant theorizing.
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.
On the contrary, pulse and resonance are two of the most intensively explored themes on post WW2 music!
Just two examples from the top of my head (among uncountable others...):
- pulse: https://youtu.be/qdzvk1BJOBQ (Ligeti)
- resonance: https://youtu.be/1v7onrjN6RE (Grisey)
It was then like waking up from a nightmare when I discovered the American school of minimalism. It restored my faith into art music and that writing for classical instruments still makes sense in the 21th century. So, it makes me wonder why the article doesn't mention what I think the greatest masterpiece of aleatoric music which was the starting point of minimalist music - Terry Riley's In C [1]. It comes from other continent than the original aleatoric music and it's aesthetic is "bit" different but it has aleatoric structure - and also listening it is joyful experience which I can't say about most of the examples linked in the article.
1: https://youtu.be/DpYBhX0UH04