Don Knuth - Constraint Based Composition

Here's a great talk Knuth did at CCRMA @ Stanford last year, on writing pipe organ compositions using Constraint Based techniques. [VIDEO]

> I agree, but I'll go further than you - I don't think this essay is confusing at all. It's simply nonsense - the kind of thing someone clever writes when they're discussing a subject completely outside their area of competence. I'm not sure what you're implying here, but Knuth does know what art is, as he almost majored in Music. See this for some recent work: [VIDEO]

Ha! On that composition: I have no ear for Western classical music, and familiarity with neither the organ as a musical instrument nor the Bible's Book of Revelation, but even so, I can guess this project is… unique. He calls it ( [LINK] ) a "somewhat literal translation" of the book into music. So for example he goes over each verse of the book, and (almost) each time it mentions "angel" he plays an 8-note arpeggio, every time it mentions "blood" he has "coagulated" (clustered) notes, and so on, setting up "dictionary" of 100+ motifs ( [LINK] ). He explains it in these videos ( [LINK] , [LINK] , [VIDEO] ). Looking through his list of musical allusions ( [LINK] ) I see things like Bruce Springsteen, even a washing machine's power on/off cycle sound. He mentions a couple of pieces of rap music for verse Revelation 3:20; maybe the reason is the same joke as [LINK] ? Overall, the project seems so crazy (is this the way anyone writes music?) that one can't help being impressed. The full performance is here: [LINK] — haven't listened to it, but online I've seen both some extremely negative and some extremely positive comments. :-) I have heard that he is a skilled organ player as you said; just earlier while searching for something else I saw a blog post about Rajeev Motwani's memorial ( [LINK] ) which mentions “Don Knuth was the organist for the entire ceremony, and played pieces you didn't think could be played on a church organ”.