A Hidden World of Musical Codes

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The harmonic alphabet

Around 1772, Thomas Arne, respected composer of Last Night of the Proms favourite, Rule Britannia, was sent a copy of a treatise by amateur musician and society cynic Thomas Thicknesse in which was outlined an improved method for using musical notation to encipher secret messages. He hoped to persuade Arne to compose with the assistance of his "harmonic alphabet".

Variants of a system attributed to the cryptologist Porta had been around for a century or two. Typically, the first half of the alphabet would be matched to a sequence of 13 minims going up the notes on a musical stave, and the second half of the alphabet to a descending sequence of 13 crotchets. Papal spies disguised as musicians could wave detailed military instructions disguised as innocent-looking scores under the noses of inquisitive border guards, with impunity.

The cipher proved to be useful not only in espionage but also in literature, inspiring a widely-read work of fiction, The Man in the Moone, by Bishop Godwin (written in 1638). This significant precursor of the English science-fiction genre imagines a race of moon dwellers who communicate by uttering musical phrases. Examples in the book reveal this lunar "language" to be a version of Porta's cipher. It appeared at a time when some scholars were seriously considering the idea of music as a potential "universal" language, influenced by reports of the unfamiliar but fascinating tonal nature of Chinese being brought back to Europe by enthusiastic Jesuit missionaries.

Beating the odds

As far as espionage was concerned, the problem with Porta's cipher was that music derived from texts was bizarre and clearly bogus to a trained eye. A more recent attempt to use a music cipher for illegal betting transactions in 1950s New York was foiled by a musical police officer who noticed something odd about intercepted scraps of music manuscript which his colleagues had assumed were authentic.

Thicknesse's innovation was to match the more frequently used letters E, T, A etc. to neighbouring musical notes, and to ensure that common note pairings such as CH, TH would make musical sense. Less frequently used letters such as Z and K were relegated to match notes left over at the extremities of the range. Music generated from text according to this system looked much more authentic.

Clandestine affairs

So convinced was he of the potency of his system, that Thicknesse's letter to Dr Arne included a cautionary admonition that it must not fall into the wrong hands - in particular, those of an unprincipled music teacher who might use it to engage in clandestine communication with a female student (such as is hinted in Molière's Le Malade imaginaire). It was a pointed dig at both Arne and his son, also a musician, who at the time was touring Europe accompanying a talented student and singer he was later to marry. Doubtless an innocent arrangement, but no master of tact, Thicknesse was adept at orchestrating society scandal.

But perhaps Thicknesse did have something of a point, for much 19th and 20th century musical repertoire is littered with coded references to clandestine love affairs. Sometimes the code is unashamedly overt, a charming means of generating musical motives as a creative stimulus, but in other instances it may be many years before a prudently suppressed sub-text eventually comes to light. It might be imagined that music generated from coded messages would sound stilted and contrived, but far from it. The results include some of the most intense, passionate and arresting music ever written.

Schumann's marriage

Schumann's attempts at musical encipherment are perhaps the most well known in regularly performed repertoire. His early Op. 1 ABEGG variations and Carnaval Op. 9, based on ASCH, use German nomenclature, slightly different to English-speaking practice, which increases the number of available notes in the standard musical alphabet. In addition to A, C, D, E, F and G, a German B equals an English B flat, H an English B, and S an English E flat. The song Mondnacht from his Liederkreis cycle (PCM 5), written shortly after his marriage to Clara, opens with an image of the marriage of earth and sky. The bass line of the piano accompaniment continuously repeats the motif E-B-E, corresponding to the German word "Ehe" (marriage), which Schumann had previously noted in a letter to Clara as being "very musical".

A secret lover

The doyen of musical ciphering, though, must surely be Alban Berg, whose music is packed full of both letter and number codes. His Chamber Concerto candidly derives musical material from the musical notes in his own name and those of his close colleagues: ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, ANTON WEBERN, ALBAN BERG. By way of contrast the ciphering behind his passionate Lyric Suite (1926) lay undiscovered for many years. In this work he derives musical motives by entwining his musical initials AB with HF, those of his secret lover Hanna Fuchs-Robetin. He also represents her young daughter Dorothea, known as Dodo, with paired C's (Doh-Doh). One of Berg's most performed works, it was only when an annotated copy of the score came to light after his widow's death that the surprisingly detailed programme was revealed. It has recently been suggested that Berg's Seven Early Songs (Prom 32) also contain a hidden cipher.

Enigmas galore

Cryptology was, of course, a particular passion of Edward Elgar, whose Enigma Variations (Prom 31) stand as an icon of the genre. The multi-faceted mysteries which continue to haunt this work remain part of its enduring allure, and will be explored in a separate feature on the BBC website.

A problem with cipher-hunting is that with sufficient ingenuity it is possible to contrive some sort of "decoding" of almost any musical material - and once the scent of a potential trail has been sniffed, there's no stopping the intrepid sleuth! The late musical cryptologist Eric Sams, and others, have made bold claims for extensive ciphering in the work of Schumann, Brahms and Elgar, but without convincing corroborative evidence different scholars are more circumspect. Similar caution applies to David Brown's identification of ciphers in the music of Tchaikovsky.

The ciphering of Agathe von Siebold (A-G-A-H-E) in Brahms's String Sextet Op.36 (PCM 6) is well validated. Not so the somewhat clumsy F-A-F code (Frei aber froh - Free but glad), so long accepted as an underpinning motif in Brahms's Symphony No.3 (Prom 38), but more recently dismissed as the speculative invention of Kalbeck, Brahms's early biographer, possibly for political reasons.

A recent revelation

One of the more astonishing, well-authenticated revelations to come to light in recent years concerns a cipher in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 (Prom 48). Shostakovich made frequent use of a musical monogram derived from the German spelling of his name and initial, DSCH, which appears at moments of special personal significance in his works and is particularly evident in this symphony. But the same work also features a prominent horn solo, a very pointed gesture recognizable as conveying something of great significance to the composer. Again, it was only when letters came to light a few years ago that it was identified as a cipher of the name of a talented composition student Elmira Nazirova from Azerbaijan.

When Shostakovich's life was at its lowest ebb, alienated and ostracized by former friends and colleagues intimidated by official Soviet censure, Elmira was conspicuously loyal. A resulting platonic 'intimacy' lasted many years. His code works by mixing both German note names (A, B, C ...) and the solfège (Do, Re, Mi ...) used in Romance and Slavic countries, which increases the number of encipherable letters. Hence E-L(a)-Mi-R(e)-A becomes in English nomenclature E-A-E-D-A. The fact that Shostakovich highlights the gesture by setting this flagrantly diatonic signal within an environment of alien harmonies makes it even more surprising that a code was not suspected or spotted before.

A genuine Da Vinci code

The idea of using solfège to encode names and messages has a long history. Indeed, the eleventh century treatise that introduced the solfège system, Guido D'Arezzo's Micrologus, suggests matching the vowels in a piece of text to specific notes to 'automatically' compose a line of melody. Later composers adapted this system, known as soggetto cavato (carved subject) to encode the name of a patron or subject to be used as a cantus firmus, or key theme, throughout a work such as a mass setting.

Leonardo Da Vinci, a great fan of puzzles and condundrums, used solfège to encode the syllables of the phrase "L'amore mi fa sollazzare" which roughly translates as "Love entertains me". It generates quite a plausible melody (with hints of Rule Britannia) and is perhaps a more authentic "Da Vinci Code" than some other claims to the title. The transcription below is fairly faithful to the original (in the Windsor Castle collection), which uses a now obsolete positioning of the "F" clef:

Coded tributes

No discussion of musical letter ciphers is complete without mentioning the well-known B-A-C-H cipher of Bach's name. Countless composers have made their own tributes, basing work on the motif almost as a rite-of-passage. Many of these take the form of ponderous exercises in counterpoint, but one particularly imaginative interpretation worth highlighting is that by Arvo Pärt whose Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten can be heard in Prom 8. Written immediately prior to the Cantus, his work bears the curious title If Bach had been a bee-keeper. The B-A-C-H motif is repeated on high strings in multiple close canon to create a micropolyphony effect like the sound of buzzing bees.

Although most musical codes encipher note pitches, it is also possible to turn text into musical rhythms, and here Morse Code has obvious potential. Pierre Boulez (whose Dérive 2 is in Prom 25) prominently ciphered the name of conductor and musical benefactor Paul Sacher into a number of his works, both as pitches (E flat - A - C - B - E - D, which is often stated as a "Sacher" chord with its own distinctive colour) and with rhythmic motifs derived from Morse Code representations of the same letters. Many contemporary composers have found Morse Code to be a valuable means of generating rhythms.

Heaven's command?

The last place in this story is reserved for the musical alphabet of Messiaen's 'communicable language', one of the most transparent, consistent and compositionally successful systems so far employed for converting text to music. Its code functions as a more sophisticated version of the Porta and Thicknesse systems in that each letter of the alphabet maps on to a specific duration as well as pitch, though in an appropriate 20th century idiom. Specific concepts are represented by distinctive musical motifs, and rich musical material can be generated from lengthy texts. Whilst appearing to address the ambitions of 17th and 18th century scholars for a universal musical language, it also provided the basis for a sequence of very successful concert works.

As far as we know, Thomas Arne ignored Thickness's overtures. Did he miss a trick? Maybe not. Perhaps he was "first at" something else, though, inadvertently stumbling across the real Da Vinci Code!

©Kevin Jones 2007

Kevin Jones researches and writes about historical and contemporary links between music and science, with a special interest in music and codes. He won the THES/OUP Science Writing Prize in 1999. He is also a composer and was Professor of Music at Kingston University until 2007.

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