Musical Cryptograms

History

Zarlino (1558) names the soggetto cavato: Josquin drew the tenor of his Mass Hercules Dux Ferrarie from the vowels of its title. German note names let a word be sung outright: Walther’s Lexicon (1732) remarks that the letters b a c h are themselves melodic, and the last fugue of the Kunst der Fuge takes them as its third subject; Schumann spelled ABEGG, and in Carnaval the letters of Asch. Kircher (1650) and Schott (1665) gave alphabets for passing a secret by singing or playing; Michael Haydn’s biographers printed his notation for letters in 1808; and in 1910 the Revue musicale S.I.M. asked six composers for pieces on HAYDN, by a rule it printed.

How it works

Each system turns letters into notes by its own rule: the German names spell with A to H and S; the soggetto cavato sings each vowel to the solmization syllable that has it, in a chosen hexachord; Kircher and Schott give each letter a step of the staff and a note value, rising for the first half of the alphabet and falling for the second; Haydn lays the alphabet on a chromatic scale in the bass that keeps sharps and flats apart; the French method counts the alphabet round A to G. The notes are drawn in modern notation and played.

How it was checked

Every printed example was read from the page images and is encoded again with the tool’s rules in the tests: BACH as Walther’s tablature gives it; the Kunst der Fuge’s subject, ABEGG and the three Sphinxes; Josquin’s subject in Petrucci’s tenor of 1505, the Kyrie and, a fifth higher, the Christe; all thirteen notes of Kircher’s example; Haydn’s plate, which prints notes without words, reads “Bleiben Sie immer mein Freund!”; and the HAYDN theme of 1910. Schott’s own examples depart from his tables at eight notes — every b of the German example a step higher, and three letters printed as their neighbours — which the tool lists.

Limits

Zarlino prints no table of vowels; the one used follows from the syllables. Schott is read from the printing of 1680, ABEGG from the collected edition of 1887, and F-A-E’s letters from Dietrich and Moser, not from the sonata. The octaves of the German and French spellings are the app’s. Haydn’s plate prints ü in a way that looks like u and i; the tool writes u and e. Kircher’s two other alphabets are not included.