After the peak of interest during the 18th century, no significant changes are recorded in the 19th century. Musical culture polarizes around a very defined romantic ideal, which sees the composer as an unrestrained genius aspiring to convey lofty values, leaving little room for games and jests. Certainly, within the pieces, elements with a playful and amused character are not lacking - not everything is always dramatic! However, these are motivational elements of imitation of sensations and lightness given by a certain type of playful attitude, certainly not by the inclusion of ludic structures or open forms within the compositions themselves. Similar practices were probably still widespread within salons and social situations, mostly connected to improvisational practices, although there is little evidence in this regard. However, at the beginning of the 1910s, a collection called Games and Puzzles for the Musical: A Collection of the Best Games, Puzzles, etc., for Musical Clubs and the Home was published by Daniel Bloomfield and is still in circulation today - it was reprinted in 2022, testifying to its cultural value or at least the renewed interest in the subject. The book consists of 51 articles for the Games chapter and 26 for the Puzzle chapter, Charades, and so on. The musical items of the cards, puzzles, and structures interpolated among them always refer to well-known authors of Western musical culture, such as Schumann, Schubert, Verdi, Beethoven, and Chopin. The described activities have both educational and entertainment purposes, and the level of complexity varies considerably. The book's preface mentions the recipients of the work: American musical clubs, a sign that evidently, the practice had shifted more towards the new continent. As is known, it is from American circles that a more radical interest in aleatoric compositions or compositions with open, decomposable, and recomposable forms will emerge. The next element in this hypothetical timeline is, in fact, the famous John Cage and the group he co-founded, the Fluxus movement, in the 1960s. Cage devoted himself almost entirely to the development of experimental musical practice that intersects greatly with the trajectory of games in music for the use of open structures, combinatorial material, and the preference for instruction systems rather than detailed scores. Cage devoted himself to the exploration of graphic scores, reinterpretations of random schemes dominated by the I-Ching rather than dice, and text-based compositions characterized by very vague and generic instructions, so much so as to undermine not only the formal structure of a piece but the very definition of "musical composition," challenging a culture based on rigid views and precise definitions of such broad and complex fields as musical expression. The centrality of indeterminacy as a formal element and not only as a collateral aspect is the key to his poetics, combined with an essential and audacious simplicity in its formulation. The radicality of this position was certainly rebellious and innovative compared to previous (and present) musical aesthetics.
There are numerous examples possible, if not almost the entire Cagean catalog, but for simplicity, the most representative and relevant to the topic at hand will be mentioned. In this sense, it is impossible not to mention Reunion (1968), a performance with Marcel Duchamp based on a chessboard. According to the John Cage website: "Reunion is an event without a score; originally performed by playing a game of chess on a chessboard created by Lowell Cross. The game works as an indeterminate structure: as a game of chess is played, the moves of the players on the board activate four compositions and distribute them to eight speakers surrounding the audience. As long as it takes, or until Duchamp is sleepy.”1
In this composition, the interconnection between game flow and the formal structure of the sonic experience is all-encompassing, and in a certain way, it makes use of both functions in very similar quantities. While it is certainly possible to play chess without the resulting sound, it is true that in that case it would only be a simple game of chess; on the contrary, however, musical production could not even occur in the absence of chess input. There is not, however, a one-to-one relationship between the two instances, as changes to the game influence the production of sound, while the latter does not influence the game – unless, of course, the players have specific intentions in their moves. However, this particular aspect is not declared in Cage's intentions and is therefore difficult to presume. Clearly, this specific analysis starts from an assumption that Cage was not interested in: his aim was actually to exhibit a "failed" control over the musical experience, to convey the sense of indeterminacy in sound construction, and thus the mutual influence between game and music was definitely not an element of his interest.
The imprint left by Cage will influence American artists (and beyond) for quite some time. It takes some years for a different approach to emerge, one that reinterprets complete indeterminacy within slightly more limited boundaries, in order to rebalance the expressive scopes of each instance in an attempt to create musical compositions with a more defined aesthetic mark, responding to the desires and tastes of the time.