Writing to Gabriel Fauré about the invitation, Camille Saint-Saëns said he was writing to Écorcheville asking him to prove that Y and N could signify D and G as "it would be annoying to get mixed up in a farcical business which would make us a laughing stock in the German musical world." This scheme was used by Jules Écorcheville, editor of the journal S.I.M., to solicit centenary commemorations of Joseph Haydn in 1909, except that he diverted the 'H' to B-natural, presumably to avoid too many repeated notes. So that A, H, O, and V are enciphered by note 'A', B, I, P and W by 'B' (flat or natural) and so on. The most popular version involved writing out the letters H-N, O-U and V-Z in lines under the original diatonic notes A-G, as follows: The 'French' method of generating cryptograms arose late in the 19th century and was more akin to normal encipherment. Johannes Brahms used B-A-H-S ( B-flat, A, B-natural, E-flat) for his surname in the A-flat minor organ fugue, and the mixed language Gis-E-La ( G-sharp, E, A) for Gisela von Arnim, among many examples. Sometimes phonetic substitution could be used, Schumann representing Bezeth by B-E-S-E-D-H. For example, Robert Schumann, an inveterate user of cryptograms, has just S-C-H-A ( E-flat, C, B-natural, A) to represent himself in Carnaval. Other note names were derived by sound, for example E-flat, 'Es' in German, could represent 'S' and A-flat the digraph 'As'.Ĭomposers less fortunate than Bach usually seem to have chosen to ignore non-musical letters in generating their motifs. The most common musical cryptogram is the B-A-C-H motif, which was used by Johann Sebastian Bach himself, by his contemporaries and by many later composers. German īecause the development of note names took place within the framework of modes, in the German-speaking world B-flat was named 'B' and B-natural was named 'H'. Historically there have been two main solutions, which may be labelled for convenience the 'German' and the 'French' methods. Since the note names only cover letters A to G (reflecting the octave repetition of these names), the problem arises as to how to cipher the rest of the alphabet. Josquin's method was imitated by several of his contemporaries and successors, including Adrian Willaert and Costanzo Festa. This is used as the cantus firmus of the mass setting. Thus the Latin name of the dedicatee 'Hercules Dux Ferrarie' ( Ercole d'Este, Duke of Ferrara) becomes re-ut-re-ut-re-fa-mi-re, which translates as D-C-D-C-D-F-E-D in modern notation with C as 'ut'. Under this scheme the vowel sounds in the text are matched to the vowel sounds of the solmization syllables of Guido of Arezzo (where 'ut' is the root, which we now call 'do'). It was named Soggetto cavato by the later theorist Zarlino. It is believed that this method was first used by Josquin des Prez in his Missa Hercules Dux Ferrarie. Sporadic earlier encipherments used solmization syllables. From the mid-19th century it has become quite common. However, this does not seem to have become a recognized technique until the Romantic period. There is a separate history of music ciphers utilizing music notation to encode messages for reasons of espionage or personal security that involved encryption and/or steganography.īecause of the multitudinous ways in which notes and letters can be related, detecting hidden ciphers in music and proving accurate decipherment can be difficult.įrom the initial assignment by Western music theorists of letter names to notes in the 9th century it became possible to reverse the procedure and assign notes to the letters of names. The methods used historically by composers were either too incomplete (i.e., did not include all of the letters of the alphabet) or too simplistic to meaningfully encrypt long text messages. These are not really rigorous cipher algorithms in the formal sense, but more like musical monograms. The most common and best known examples result from composers using musically translated versions of their own or their friends' names (or initials) as themes or motifs in their compositions. Message coding technique through music The BACH motif.Ī musical cryptogram is a cryptogrammatic sequence of musical symbols which can be taken to refer to an extra-musical text by some 'logical' relationship, usually between note names and letters.
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