Knuth: Fantasia Apocalyptica (2017)

An intriguing notion was soon planted in my head, namely that it might be possible to create a pleasing piece of music that incorporates Revelation’s numbers and other mystical symbols in essentially their original order. On the day before Thanksgiving in 2011 — when I was nearly 74 years old, and after I’d spent much of the day working as usual on — I took a blank notebook out of storage and wrote the following:

I learned a bit later that Victorinus of Poetovio, who wrote the first full-length commentary on Revelation (c. 270 A.D.), had already remarked with admiration that Revelation is organized rather like a piece of music, in that its repetitions of symbols and themes don’t simply unfold in straight lines. My job, therefore, when translating a particular line of Revelation, was to come up with music that had a certain melody and/or rhythm and/or musical effect, etc.

Source: www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu