Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica | Hacker News Reader

Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica

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> 2) I also spell some things out by using Morse code. For instance, the rhythm "dash dot dash" in measures 12, 13, 16, 17, etc. of Chapter 1 is Morse code for "invitation to transmit".

As a software engineer who is Catholic and appreciates puns, I find this to be pure gold.

This is a very complex piece and I expect many renditions and adaptations will arise out of it, both in the classical/traditional circles as well as avant-garde jazz ones.

If you haven't read them, you would probably also like his 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated and Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.

On top of being a genius, reading Knuth is such a pleasant experience. Without having ever interacted with him, he comes across as such a wonderful soul.

Yes, that's one advantage of being a genius - reading books that seem difficult to others becomes a pleasant experience.

Not how I took that. There are large parts of his books that are difficult to read. Yes. However, they are a lot more approachable than you would think. Most of them are oddly written, but his humor is pleasant and I have found thinking of algorithms similar to how he puts them helps. A lot.

It has helped humble me though, to know that pretty much everything he presents requires study. I have had few things from his book that I just got. Most required trying several times before they clicked.

And, if you ever read some of his afterwards, there are plenty of places where he concedes mistakes he made. Is really nice to see.

You definitely don’t need to be a genius to read any of Knuth’s books. You do need to go slowly and patiently and work hard at it though (or have significant past experience / preparation).

Knuth’s work is full of dry wit, and it’s possible to spend much of the time giggling as you read.

Knuth is very pleasant in person too!

"And of course a musical work on the Apocalypse should also contain calypso."

Prof. Knuth's willingness to take on such ambitious projects and his persistence in completing so many of them is an inspiration.

I would dearly love to see this lost work, if only because it was written by Dr. Knuth:

I spent a lot of time in high school reading books on orchestration, and I wrote a fairly good-sized work for symphonic band entitled Milton and the Rhinocerous. (It was a spoof of Peter and the Wolf, using a story by Roger Price that I didn't know was protected by copyright. I was blithely ignorant about intellectual property.) I proudly presented that piece to the band director, and he proceeded to lose it. As far as I know, no trace of that piece remains; and everybody, including me, is probably better off as a result.

The book of Revelation fascinated me from childhood into my teenage years. As an adult I have some negative opinions about it since it has inspired so much terrible behavior over the years. It has a very complicated and controversial history[1], and the preacher at my mother's church completely refused to talk about it. I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if it hadn't been included in the cannon (it almost didn't make the cut and still isn't accepted by some churches).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation

Interesting (but not surprising, really) that the typeset score was produced with Sibelius and not LilyPond or something similar.

Can you elaborate?

Not the OP, but LilyPond is a TeX-like music editor. Sibelius is a WYSIWYG editor. One might expect the author of TeX to prefer a similar approach to typesetting music. Like the OP, though, I don't find it surprising. Writing in your native language is relatively easy. Writing music is a lot harder, especially for an amateur (like me). Using the most intuitive software available is probably a good idea.

Knuth wrote the music by hand and someone else transcribed it for him.

LilyPond is a pain to write in by hand. When looking at the text, it's difficult to see the cleffs side-by-side. I think most people who use LilyPond use one of the GUI editors.

LilyPond text format is best seen as an open file-format in ascii, primarily for machine consumption, not human.

That's not my experience. I did quite a bit of engraving using LilyPond as part of my music publishing company (a catalog of around 100 organ, choral, and/or instrumental works, many of them quite complex). I always entered the notation by hand, using the Frescobaldi editor to give easier previewing and various shortcuts.

I'm an organist myself, and entering music that way became extremely fluid—to the point that I felt like I was "playing" the music as I typed. For complex three-stave music, I got up to a pace of a couple of pages per hour. Polyphonic music with well-written voice-leading (i.e. independent voices, rather than big chunks of notes) was especially pleasant to engrave in this way.

Cool. Do you have a sample of some music you did, so I can figure out how to work with it easily? Thanks.

I’m not remotely proficient in music engraving, but I found it pretty straight forward to type a few pages of music into Lilypond format a few years ago, just using a regular plain text editor.

Comparable to writing (La)TeX for mathematics I’d say.

I don't have any samples handy, but here are some pointers:

1. Before starting, number the measures on the original score. I write the number every fifth measure.

2. Before engraving any actual notes, I'll make a voice that is entirely "skips", plus time signatures, key changes, barlines, etc. I include this voice on each stave.

3. I always try to deconstruct the piece into individual voices. Of course, this is straightforward for many pieces (choral and instrumental especially), but every piece with good voice-leading can be broken up like this. My music theory background (I was a Music & Comp-Sci double-major in college), along with my experience as a chorister and organist, helps me a lot with this.

4. Engrave one voice at a time. For some pieces, this means that I'm engraving half of a stave's notes (or less) in each pass.

5. In most cases, I put a single measure on each line. I make sure to use bar-checks whenever possible (once in a while they won't work, if I'm doing something weird that confuses LilyPond). Every fifth measure, I add a comment with the measure number (to match up with the numbers I've written on the physical score).

6. I use LilyPond's various built-in checks (bar number checks, octave checks...) liberally. They're very similar to unit tests, in that they allow for much easier "refactoring" down the line.

7. The right environment helps a lot. When I was doing tons of engraving, I had a document holder with a movable marker to help me keep my place. I rotated one of my monitors to portrait to show a full page; I'd keep the markup on the other monitor, and had a keyboard shortcut set up to easily run LilyPond as needed. I'd often run it after making just a change or too.

8. LilyPond's layout engine is astonishingly good, but I'd still have to make tweaks to the final output in some cases. I had a macro set up so that I could do a quick /moveGrob to tweak the extra-offset property of a grob to move it without changing the behavior of the layout engine.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_1a6bHGQGo

I heard a performance of a couple chapters last month. I'm not musically or scripturally sophisticated enough to appreciate the verse-by-verse mapping to Revelation, but the music on its own was enjoyable.

Not my thing. But it is Knuth. And the one thing that guarantees is that it will be interesting.

Before I attempt it, has anyone scanned the scores to MIDI to hear what they sound like?

Did not know Knuth was a Lutheran Christian.

the sortest link to listen to it?

Mindblowing.

This is cool. The organ is infrequently used because it is so huge but if you want high drama it's the right tool for the job.

Interstellar on church organ is intense. Feel inspired here:

https://youtu.be/zg5QMysuSYg

This is awesome, thank you for sharing. Is there any kind of genre or name associated with epic organ music?

Dramatic music has deep roots in our classical tradition. It is something that is richly influenced by culture which is interesting.

A typical example is Carmina Burana, which qualifies as the 'most damn German thing ever' to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFSK0ogeg4

It's not exclusively about the pipe organ but think people on Youtube refer to examples of it as 'Epic Music', often inspired by visuals from film or gaming. If you search 'epic music' there are a huge number of channels dedicated to it.

Here's a Japanese example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7HL5wYqAbU

And the most famous example from my country:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0v_pu6miJ8

By Carmina Burana, you mean the Carl Orff version? Because that's basically unrelated to the Medieval piece. Definitely "richly influenced by modern culture", compared to the original.

There's a ton of music actually written for the organ which is quite interesting, in a variety of styles.

I love organ music; but you have to listen to it live. The low notes don't come across properly on recorded media (also you don't feel your chest resonate).

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, one of the most famous pieces of organ music ever, played on an organ built in 1730 (and, if I read the history right, it was actually specified by Bach):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnuq9PXbywA

You can hear the recording simply outright fail on the low notes. The organ has a 32-foot pipe, which produces 16Hz notes. The reocrding simply doesn't do it justice; if you ever get the chance, listen to it live; it's an almost transcendent experience.

There are, however, apparently two organs in the world with 64-foot pipes (8Hz!) and several more which can synthesise an 8Hz subharmonic using smaller pipes, but I haven't found a recording I trust of it yet.

I'm sure you're right, bach it's pretty damn good! Sometimes you can just sense history through the music.

I probably wouldn't pick up on loss, I expect it is like enjoying real bean coffee vs the granulated matter that passes as a substitute. It takes a while for your taste buds to discern the difference and I expect it is the same for our ears.

Having said that I also have been listening to experimental ambient music so I know I enjoy the deeper vibrations you get at that level.

There's plenty of 20th century organ music, a lot of it is religious (my father was an organist). It's hard to record pipe organs, particularly the low bass, and without excellent playback equipment the presence is lost. You might be interested in Messiaen's organ works or in the music of his predecessors Franck and Dupré.

I'll check it out.

> The organ is infrequently used because it is so huge

Knuth has one at home (fun fact: so does Alan Kay). He sat down with me and went through the score with me -- it's full of great puns (e.g. the beginning is an inverted Toccata und Fuge d-Moll) but, well, he shouldn't quit his day job. Which admittedly is doing whatever he wants!

He's also really really amazing on the keyboard. We saw him on the street the other day and my kid pointed and said "Look, there's that awesome harpsichord player!" I've tried to explain that he's an amazing computer scientist but kiddo has different priorities: computer scientists are a dime a dozen while harpsichord players, well, they're rare.

(I'm going to get my revenge by forcing the kid to program in MIX).

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