Roomer Chance (2025)
"Leaving it all to chance" sings Ronja Schößler in her angelic voice on today’s song. While Schößler, accompanied by her band Rommer, merely sings about chance, American composer and artist John Cage took the concept one step further—at times leaving large parts of his work to chance itself.
Cage employed chance operations to remove artistic intention from the compositional process, allowing sounds to exist in their own right rather than serving as expressions of the composer’s preferences. For instance, he used the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text, to make compositional decisions about pitch, duration, and dynamics, among other things, by flipping coins or rolling dice. A prime example is his 1951 piece “Music of Changes”, in which he applied I Ching-generated decisions to large charts of sounds, durations, dynamics, tempo and densities, making each performance unique.
Fortunately, Rommer didn’t leave everything to chance in today’s song, allowing us to enjoy this carefully crafted shoegaze/dream-pop gem again and again.
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