When I was in high school my best friend Marcus McDaniel was working on an opera about a scientist who generated music from the digits of pi. The crisis in the opera (which sounded to be a very brief work) came when the music came to an unexpected halt, indicating a final digit to this transcendental number. The opera never came to fruition, but a web site just forwarded to me allows you to be that scientist. You can either choose your own pitches to relate to the Arabic numbers, or the program will do it for you.
Marcus also had another opera planned, based on the life of Maurice Chevalier, titled Der Mauricekavalier. The world hasn’t caught up with that one, nor did I ever complete my own contribution to musical punnery, Das Knaben Zauberflöte, though I did eventually write Das Knaben Wunderklavier.
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