[…] Austrian composer Maximilian Stadler (1748-1833) put together a set of musical bars and tables for generating minuets and trios with the help of dice.

One well-known example of such a scheme is the “Musikalisches W�rfelspiel” (Musical Dice Game), first published in 1792 in Berlin. Attributed by the publisher to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), it appeared a year after the composer’s death.

The idea was to compose a 16-measure “waltz” by rolling dice to decide which measures to select from a large pool of choices. […]