hey, welcome to 12tone! check this out: (bang)
this little melody is known as the Bach motif,
and it's been used for centuries as a tribute
to one of Western music's most famous composers,
including many times by Bach himself.
but it does more than just reference him:
it actually spells out his name.
how? well, let's talk about musical cryptograms.
a cryptogram is a coded representation of
a piece of text.
there's lots of ways to do that with music,
but probably the simplest is just to use note
names.
we represent our notes with letters anyway,
so why not just arrange them to spell out
words? if we wanted to write the word "cabbage",
for instance, we could do it like this: (bang)
but we run into a problem pretty quickly:
our note names only go up to G, leaving most
of the alphabet unaccounted for.
we can stretch this a bit further, though,
by exploiting an unusual quirk of traditional
German notation. for various reasons, German
musicians often refer to the pitch we call
"Bb" as simply "B", and what we call "B" as
"H".
the reasons for this are complicated, messy,
and somewhat disputed, but if you're interested
there's a link in the description.
regardless of why, though, this method gives
us one more letter to use, which it turns
out is just enough to write out the name "Bach".
(bang)
from there, though, we have to get creative,
and one common source of extra letters is
solfege, another system of note names that
assigns a unique syllable to every pitch.
you're probably already familiar with it:
this is that do-re-mi stuff that Julie Andrews
was singing about, and we can pilfer it to
give us more sounds. for example, we could
code the name "Mila" like this (bang) literally,
"Mi-La".
or we can just steal their consonants, using
"Re" for R and "Ti" for, well, T. we can even
combine these methods, like in Shostakovich's
Symphony number 10, where he encoded his pupil
Elmira's name like this: (bang)
after that, we just kind of start grabbing
random things that we can pretend are letters,
and it turns out German notation has our back
again here.
where we would say "flat", German musicians
instead add an "es" to the end of the note,
so C flat would be Ces, D flat would be Des,
and Eb would be Es, which sounds remarkably
similar to the letter S. this device was used
by Dimitri Shostakovich to encode his own
abbreviation (bang) and by many composers
to spell out Paul Sacher's name (bang) as
a tribute on his 70th birthday.
if you try hard enough you can probably find
a few more, but this has all been a pretty
ad hoc process.
we've tossed a bunch of systems together to
try to wring out letters wherever we can find
them.
this hodge-podge technique is often called
the German method, and there is another way.
in the French method, we start by writing
out the seven note letters, then the next
seven letters below them, then the next seven,
then the last five.
now each note represents any of the letters
in its column.
so if I wanted to write out my name, I'd start
with a C, then for the O I'd use an A, for
the R I'd use a D, and then for the Y, another
D. this technique can be a little harder to
interpret, because you're using fewer unique
notes than the German method, but on the other
hand you can represent all 26 letters, which
seems like a pretty significant upside.
Later composers tried to add some clarity
by using more complex systems of mapping.
Honegger, for instance, included sharps and
flats to use more notes, and Messiaen developed
what he called his "communicable language",
a system that assigned not just a pitch, but
also a duration and register to each letter,
which allowed him to unambiguously transcribe
whole sentences into music, as long as you
knew the rules.
of course, taking that a step further, we
don't even have to use note names at all.
there are plenty of other places we can hide
our messages.
we could use durations, or intervals, or dynamics,
or whatever else you can think of.
J.C. Faber even encoded the name Ludovicus
across a nine-movement symphony with a system
based on the number of notes he gave the trumpet
in each movement.
there's really no limits.
so was any of this actually used for espionage,
though?
well, probably not.
it's certainly not impossible, but there doesn't
appear to be much evidence that these techniques
were used by spies to send real covert messages,
if for no other reason than that it's pretty
impractical and not that hard to decipher.
musical cryptograms were mainly used for fun,
as a way for composers to pay secret tribute
to each other, and to place little easter
eggs in their work for listeners to find.
but hey, when there's spies involved, you
never know.
anyway, thanks for watching! if you want to
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