musical optimization

i never write about music, although i listen to and think about and play it a lot. i hereby inaugurate a new journal tag: music. i'll start with a simple observation: Hindemith is the Nelder-Meade algorithm of music. he starts in what seems like a random place, with chaos and dissonance, and gradually winds inward to a tight, crystalline, consonant solution. supposedly he had a System, an algorithm for generating this kind of music, so i think the optimization problem analogy is apt.