In the 8/28/01 Digest, Randolph Herr mentioned (quoting Alfred Einstein)
"[Mozart] once took up the problem ... of composing minuets
"mechanically," by putting two-measure melodic fragments together in
any order."

This reminded me of a something I had back in the '70's.  I don't
recall the specifics, but I believe that was a 'game' of some sort.
Included with the 'game' were a large number of one (or two) measure
snippets of music.  One would roll the dice (as I recall) and select
the next measure of music based on the numbers produced.  As you
continued to play the game, you would eventually end up with a 'piece
of music'.  As I said, I'm not sure exactly what would happen, other
than the fact that you would end up with a minuet - sometimes sounding
rather jagged and 'fake', but sometimes being actually rather nice.

I assumed at the time that someone had just 'invented' this game, but
it would seem that there was precedence for it!

This, of course, could bring up quite a discussion as to what makes
one melody something that is memorable, and another quite forgettable.
Considering there are only 12 notes available for composers as well as
a limited number of rhythms, there are bound to be many songs that
sound an awful lot alike.  I suspect that nearly every combination of
the available 12 notes has been produced by now, so how can there
really be much 'new music'.