Aleatory in the context of "William S. Burroughs"

The cut-up technique (or découpé in French) is an aleatory narrative technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.

20th-century classical music is Western art music that was written between 1901 and 2000, inclusive. Musical style diverged during the 20th century as it never had previously, so this century was without a dominant style. Modernism, impressionism, and post-romanticism can all be traced to the decades before the turn of the 20th century, but can be included because they evolved beyond the musical boundaries of the 19th-century styles that were part of the earlier common practice period. Neoclassicism and expressionism came mostly after 1900. Minimalism started later in the century and can be seen as a change from the modern to postmodern era, although some date postmodernism from as early as about 1930. Aleatory, atonality, serialism, musique concrète, and electronic music were all developed during the century. Jazz and ethnic folk music became important influences on many composers during this century.

William Seward Burroughs II (/ˈbʌroʊz/; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodern author who influenced both underground and popular culture and literature. Much of Burroughs's work is highly experimental and features unreliable narrators. Also noted as semi-autobiographical, his work often drew from his experiences with drug addiction, and featured his various places of residence as settings in much of his work. With Brion Gysin, Burroughs popularized the cut-up, an aleatory literary technique. His writing also engaged frequent mystical, occult, or otherwise magical themes, constant preoccupations in both his fiction and real life.

Born into a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs attended Harvard University, where he studied English, then anthropology as a postgraduate, and went on to medical school in Vienna. In 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army to serve during World War II. After being turned down by both the Office of Strategic Services and the Navy, he veered into substance abuse, beginning with morphine and developing a heroin addiction that would affect him for the rest of his life. In 1943, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac while living in New York City. This liaison would become the foundation of the Beat Generation, later a defining influence on the 1960s counterculture.