Franco Donatoni is best known for his works after 1967, music that exemplifies an inventive, virtuosic style, often treating instruments in a brilliant, Baroque manner. Yet between 1962 and 1967, Donatoni's musical style evolved from one marked by John Cage's aleatoric principles to a vigorously mechanistic style where an artistinal approach to composition was valued above the creative process. By the late 1970s, the "negativity" of total serialism and aleatorism would be abandoned in favor of a new process that still retained elements of freedom and precision without being bound by them.