Steve Schwartz responds, concerning aleatory music:

>I'm always wary of blanket statements about entire genres of music,
>particularly railing against specific techniques.Technique is neutral,
>I should think.

Right, but chance is not a technique.  Sounds strange, but please remember
the classical meaning of the word "technique".

>Technique is neutral, I should think.  It depends on how the technique is
>used

That's the problem:  being not a technique, you don't "use" chance in
music; you just can open the door and let it pass into the composition,
or into the performance.  So, there's no "how".  Let's take two aleatory
"works" by two different composers.?Could you say which one belongs to each
one?.

>So by you Benjamin Britten is a sterile composer? After all, many passages
>generated by chance techniques appear in his later music.

Let's put it this way:  Cage's "Four Walls" is a beautiful work, and it has
SOME aleatory features too.  You can't deduce such a question from my post,
since I just wrote about how easily does (actually, did) the theory of
aleatory music works as a cap for sterile artists and critics.
Paraphrasing you:  "It depends on how the theory is used".

>I happen to like much of Stockhausen, but not because of or despite his
>aleatorics.  Furthermore, not all of Stockhausen is aleatory.

No, of course. He invented and fixed many other theoretical caps.

Pablo Massa
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