Word: diced
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...most durable work - 41 hours durable, to be exact. As usual, his operating premise is that art is more of a manifestation of nature than an expression of man. This means, to Cage, that a work ideally should be as based on random chance as a roll of the dice, and be controlled by the composer as little as possible...
...Experience of Things. Cage patterned six of the harpsichord solos after a 200-year-old romp known as Dice Music. Attributed to Mozart, who liked a joke as much as anyone else, Dice Music consists of a waltz theme and a set of variations that are determined in a Cage-like manner, by rolling dice. In Hpschd, Cage embroidered the variations with snippets from works by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni-even Cage. Each player had seven 20-minute chunks of music to choose from. Once having played, he was free to chat for a while with the listeners...
Unable to beat the houses, Sihanouk decided to go them one better. Now le tout Pnompenh is flocking to a spectacular riverside gambling complex, opened as a government monopoly in February. Inside a huge casino, thousands challenge the laws of chance in an assortment of card and dice games; in nine nearby air-conditioned chalets, the more affluent play roulette, chemin de fer and mah-jongg. Of the daily winnings of $75,000, the government skims off $40,000, while $25,000 goes to cover operating expenditures. The rest of the take is divided among 25 concessionaires, including several owners...
...benefits have been felt across the board. Government revenues are up 10% over last year, thanks entirely to the new operation. Cambodia's local industries have benefited: all the pieces of casino equipment-including dice, roulette wheels, cards and chemin de fer "shoes"-are made at home. Several pawnshops have sprung into existence to help out unlucky bettors...
...Whips. Most of Xenakis' ear-jarring music is an extension in sound of the calculus of probability, one of whose basic concepts is Bernoulli's law of large numbers. It says, in effect, that the occurrence of any chance event-the roll of a seven in dice, for example, or the random collision of stray molecules in the atmosphere-is more likely to conform to the prescribed statistical odds with each successive attempt. To Xenakis, this mathematical absolute has profound philosophical meaning: it implies that the changing structure of certain events in life, including the sounds that...