Scan 107
The New Grove Dictionary Of Music And Musicians 5 Ed. 2nd, 1904
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1interest, towards the random allocation of cipher letters to musical notes, the occasional representation of one letter by a two-note group, and in general a policy of analogy with real music, at least in appearance (for which purpose Klüber recommended the addition of sharps and flats) This had always seemed desirable for cryptographic reasons. Thus the papal encipherers had added to their music-cipher messages an ostensibly relevant liturgical text, so as to avert suspicion In the later 18th century and early 19th the possibility of combining real cipher with real music was the subject of lively experiment and debate (Blair, 1819) A notable contribution was made by Michael Haydn who (according to his biographers, 1808) invented an elaborate music-cipher of his own (ex 5) presumably for communication purposes but perhaps for composition as well At least it strikingly foreshadows cipher systems later used as compositional devices (e.g. ex 10), and it may even have been designed (e.g. in its treatment of modified vowels) to yield results which were not too unlike real music But it remained a private initiative The only documented contemporary use of music-cipher in practice, in the French diplomatic service (correspondence between the Duke of Havre and the Duke of Lorges, Lhm Add.32259, f.180v) relies on a Porta-type system which is neither very convincing musically nor very secure cryptographically This use continued as late as 1800 Nor is the type entirely extinct in this century, the first solved intercept of the New York City Police Department (Anon., 1952) was a series of melodic lines in the treble clef which turned out to be a note-for-figure encipherment of illegal wagers furnished with occasional accents and pauses in an optimistic attempt at verisimilitude
33 OTHER COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS USING MUSICAL SYMBOLS. Meanwhile, on a different (not strictly cryptographic) level, musical sounds or symbols had been considered as the basis for more general semantic systems and structures One pioneer was Bishop Wilkins, who suggested (1641) that the ordinary notes of a musical instrument might be used to express not only letters and words but things and notions, so that 'there might be such a general language as should be equally speakable by all nations and peoples'. Leibniz (c1678) put forward a similar suggestion for an artificial language consisting solely of tones and intervals (Couturat, 1903). There must also have been practical research and experiment in this area, for in 1800 (as Klüber recorded, 1809) pupils at a school for the blind in Paris were 'reading' phrases played on the violin. The (unspecified) techniques used may have been a Porta-type system extended for communication purposes (as by Bertini, 1811) But they were more likely to have been precursors of the ideas later developed by François Sudre (1787-1862), whose pupils could also converse with him via the violin By 1817 he had constructed a complete artificial language, in which any seven different symbols could be combined five at a time, with variations of order and stress. The seven syllables or pitches of tonic sol-fa formed one obvious basis His system incorporated such quasi-musical ideas as the use of 'domisol' (i.e. the perfect triad) to mean 'God' and its retrograde form to mean 'Satan' Similarly 'sollasi' means 'ascend' and 'silasol' 'descend' The idea was officially welcomed in its day as having potential practical value, but it found no lasting application, and was in effect superseded by the invention of the Morse code. With the demise of Sudre's system the last serious attempt to exploit purely musical resources for purely linguistic purposes came to an end.
54 MUSIC USING CRYPTOGRAPHIC AND RELATED CONCEPTS No doubt the idea of using the elements of music to convey extra-musical semantic significance (whether audible or inaudible, overt or covert) is as old as music itself Some devices depend on written notation Words can be sung, for added emphasis, to their corresponding solmization names (e.g. 're' for 'king', 'sol' for 'sun'). Examples are found from Josquin to Schütz (Wessely, 1973, see also SOLMIZATION) EYE MUSIC, adding visual meaning to written scores, is found as late as Bach, some of whose music may also contain the idea of a ritual symbolism of gesture, motion or number (Krause, 1964) Numbers can be signified by intervals or instruments, voices or entries, from the 14th century (Wessely, 1973) to Bach (Krause, 1964, Geiringer, 1956) The numbers thus conveyed may then be used according to strict cryptographic principles to encipher letters of the alphabet, according to the system already described above This device was used in the early 18th century by J. C Faber, whose Neu erfundene obligate Composition enciphers the name 'Ludovicus' by the number of notes allotted to a particular instrument in each of nine movements The same determined encipherer also used a Porta system analogous to ex 3 as a means of incorporating messages, e.g in the viola part of a quartet.
7The most common of all such devices however was the use of the letter-names of notes to create themes from words or (more usually) names of people. This idea too no doubt dates back to the beginning of letter nomenclature It is particularly associated with the name of Bach, which in German usage can be written as in ex.6 Bach himself and his contemporaries incorporated that phrase in many works (as did Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Busoni and several others; see B A-C H). Bach showed further ingenuity in his seven-part canon over a ground of F–A–B–E, headed 'FABERepetatur' possibly a suitably cryptic allusion to J. C. Faber himself or a kinsman. Such ideas flourished especially in the common ground
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