BACK, HAUNTED MUSSEL, BACK I SAY
Anyways so (very simplified,) aleatoric music is a category that encompasses any music whose structure is primarily left up to chance. The term 'aleatoric music' started coming up in the 1950's and scholars are usually using it to refer to post-1900 stuff like Ives, Stockhausen, even Cage.
BUT there's this really fascinating mass written in 1539 by Johannes Ockeghem called Missa cuiusvis toni (literally, "Mass in any mode") that's one of the only surviving masses of its time written without any kind of clef or key signature; the idea is that you can feasibly sing it in the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian or Mixolydian modes, and it's up to the performers. (Switching medieval modes is a different concept than transposing modern scales, partly because of things like the Phrygian mode having cadences that aren't compatible with the other modes. Ockeghem did some tricksy things with plagal cadences to get around it.) Of course this is far from the only example and not the absolute earliest! there are plenty of other examples of earlier chance music through history, and later, like Mozart using dice games to compose with random fragments. This mass is just the earliest one we have access to that is a reasonably tidy comparison to the 1950's-defined philosophy of aleatoric music.
Anyways it's just very perpetually funny to me that a bunch of American dudes in the 50's were like "We most definitely certainly invented the idea of leaving some elements of a musical composition to chance" when the whole reason they had to formalize it as a compositional style was basically a rebuttal to the past 100 years of increasingly hyper-structured music (Wagner, the fallout of the War of the Romantics, etc). It's like no guys this is very much a very recent problem created by your own direct musical lineage that you are now solving. but for the most part the rest of music throughout the world and throughout history does this often, & a lot of this is survivorship bias bc of the kind of music the Western classical tradition chooses to preserve and pass along as standard performance and pedagogical repertoire
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