Dice and a Boring Guy
Music publishing was a thriving, competitive trade during the latter part of the 18th century.
Publishers looked for gimmicks to bring new customers into their music shops. One idea was to
publish systems that would allow amateurs unfamiliar with the techniques or rules of composition
compose music on their own. Many of these schemes involved using dice or other randomizers to
select musical fragments from an array of choices. Kirnberger suggested the use of dice for this
purpose in his book 'The Ever-ready Composer of Polonaises and Minuets', published in 1757.
Austrian composer Maximilian Stadler later put a set of musical bars and tables together for
generating minuets and trios using dice. The idea being to cut and paste pre-written measures of
music together at random by a dice roll, creating a piece of music. The sum of the thrown numbers is
looked up in a scoring table to determine which measure to play. Mozart's 'Musikalisches
Würfelspiel' became a famous game, and was first published in 1793, two years after Mozart's death.
Even today, if one listens closely to some modern "original" composers, one detects a system similar
to this in play in their works.
Although he wrote keyboard and chamber music, songs and a small amount of
church music, Kirnberger should be respected for his best achievement: he regarded
J.S. Bach as the greatest of all composers and applied exhaustive effort to get Bach's
largely unpublished chorale preludes preserved in print at a time when Bach was in
danger of being forgotten. Kirnberger also developed theories of music that would
carry on Bach's musical thinking.
His widely published theoretical works so inspired subsequent generations to study Bach's technique
and form that many later composers studied Bach's music and brought him back to his exalted place.
Young Kirnberger was introduced to Bach around 1738, and he quickly relocated to Leipzig to study
with the master. From 1741 to 1751, Kirnberger lived in Poland and worked for various noblemen.
Upon his return to Germany in 1751, he became one of Friedrich the Great's violinists. Later, in the
service of the Princess Anna Amalia, he founded the Amailien-Bibliothek which became an important
repository of Bach manuscripts. He kept this job for life.
Johann Philipp Kirnberger, 1721-1783, was among the leading theorists and commentators on music
of the 18th century, but as a composer is at best unknown and, at worst, considered rather boring.
In the 16th century it was a silver mining center. The duke of Saxe-Coburg traded Saalfeld for
Gotha with the duke of Saxe-Meiningen in 1826. The city included a 14th-century church, a
16th-century city hall, a 13th-century Franciscan monastery and castle, and an 18th-century palace.  
It is one of the most ancient towns in Thuringia, and was lorded over by the palace Kitzerstein,
standing on an eminence above the river, built by King Heinrich I. and further constructed the 16th
century. There is also the ruin of the HoherSchwarm, later called the Sorbenburg, a relic of the past
said to have been erected in the 7th century. Saalfeld is a small industrial town. Thuringia towns also
include Eisenach, Gera, Jena, Gotha, Suhl, Nordhausen, and the capital Erfurt. It includes part of
the Harz mountains and a forest, the beautiful Thüringer Wald.
Johann Philipp Kirnberger was among the many musical souls born in
Thuringia. Today's Saalfeld-Rudolstadt, his birthplace, is in the south of
Thuringia, a medley of little dukedoms and home to Luther, Bach and
others. Saalfeld, the capital of the duchy Saxony-Saalfeld from 1690 to
1735, was about 24 miles from Weimar and founded around 1200AD.