Peter Desain. Lisp as a Second Language: Functional Aspects. Perspectives on New Music 20, pp.192–222. 1990.

In some ways this article should come under “applications”, as it’s mainly concerned with using Lisp to represent and manipulate music. Indeed, it presents a system that can be used to perform all sorts of common transformations of the tones and timing of a piece. It’s easy to see how the resulting system could be used to compose and then to drive instruments, for example through a MIDI interface.

The music perspective is however secondary to the goal of teaching and showcasing Lisp through the medium of a realistic example of symbolic programming. It covers a lot of ground, starting with lists and functions and including first-class functions and combinators as means of implementing the musical structures. It’s a great piece of pedagogy that treats the application and the language as closely linked, and not shying-away from some quite advanced techniques that have clear applications in the domain. It would be great to see this used as a basis for actual musical composition and performance.