![]() ![]() 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. Much rarer is the use of music notation to encode messages for reasons of espionage or personal security called steganography.īecause of the multitudinous ways in which notes and letters can be related, detecting hidden ciphers and proving accurate decipherment is 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 most common and best known examples result from composers using ciphered versions of their own or their friends' names as themes or motifs in their compositions. We had a ‘chorus’ that everyone played that we returned to several times, giving our composition a Rondo form.Message coding technique through music The BACH motif.Ī musical cryptogram is a cryptogrammatic sequence of musical symbols, a sequence which can be taken to refer to an extra-musical text by some 'logical' relationship, usually between note names and letters. In a class of 15 students, we listened to each of the students’ word choices, tried out pairs and trios together, looking for pleasing combinations, then decided on an order of words for our class composition. Students might also write a melody by stringing a number of words together. We have made some beautiful musical pieces in the past where each person plays their chosen word, and we try out different words in different combinations. ![]() I cover quite a range of different approaches under the idea of ‘alphabets’, but one of the things I like to do with ESL students is ask them to list all the words they can think of that can be spelt with the letters A-G (the musical alphabet as it appears on our classroom percussion instruments) and to try playing the words.īag, bad, bee, bead, beef, beg, bed, beaded, begged I have blogged in the past on some of my projects that focus on Musical Alphabets. ![]()
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