Don Knuth - Constraint Based Composition

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] , [this 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”.