Sticks and Strings, Circuits, Worms and Earth: Divination or Automation in Composition Practices

Divination, meaning to foresee through the supernatural or divine forces, has a diverse and extensive history. Cicero’s 44 BC text De Divinatione divides these practices into two categories: Divinatio Naturalis, revelations from dreams or possessions by the gods, and Divinatio Artificiosa, the art of interpreting signs or symbols through sortilege or cleromancy which makes use of instruments such as sticks, dice or cards by casting lots to signify an outcome. These processes of shuffling and drawing or casting are seen by many as divine acts that make use of higher forces, and for the history of automation, sortilege practices are seen as an early form of mechanical hardware random number or data generation, the outcomes being brought about by chance.
In this paper I will unpack the at times dialectical relationship between divination and automation by discussing how practices of sortilege are implemented in the work of three artists to assign the labour of compositional choices in music and sound to chance or divine forces. This paper will look at the American experimental composer John Cage whose composition Music of Changes (1951) was done by consulting the Chinese book of changes, the I Ching, David Tudor the pianist famous for the performance of Cage’s work who transitioned into a practice known as composition inside electronics from 1964, and the contemporary artist Martin Howse whose sound generator and noise processor The Dark Interpreter works as an interface between earth and circuit which he discusses explicitly as an act of divination.