Songs for Saturday: Music for the Apocalypse

[mdlbear]

One of my favorite professors in the CS department was Don Knuth, world-renowned as the author of The Art of Computer Programming (he is currently working on Volume 4, I believe), and the inventor of the TeX computer typesetting system (which I use for my song lyrics, using a set of custom macros on top of LaTeX.)

He is also the only person I know who has a pipe organ in his living room, which brings me to today's "song" for Saturday: his remarkable multimedia organ composition Fantasia Apocalyptica. You can watch the North American premier performance here, on YouTube. The video uses a split screen to show the organist, the text in both Greek and English, the score, and a series of illustrations by Duane Bibby, available in book form as Fantasia Apocalyptica Illustrated).

I recommend starting with the page on Knuth's web site, which is written as a series of (frequently asked?) questions and answers and goes into considerable detail. I found it best to take the piece itself in small segments following its natural division into chapters, but if you have an hour and a half to spare, go for it.

It seems particularly appropriate for these times.