Musical cryptogram
The most common and best known examples result from composers using musically translated versions of their own or their friends' names (or initials) as themes or motifs in their compositions.
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'.
Sometimes phonetic substitution could be used, Schumann representing Bezeth by B-E-S-E-D-H. Johannes Brahms used B-A-H-S (B-flat, A, B-natural, E-flat) for his surname in the A-flat minor organ fugue, and the mixed language Gis-E-La (G-sharp, E, A) for Gisela von Arnim, among many examples.
[4] This scheme was used by Jules Écorcheville, editor of the journal S.I.M., to solicit centenary commemorations of Joseph Haydn in 1909, except that he diverted the 'H' to B-natural, presumably to avoid too many repeated notes.
A French tradition of celebratory uses developed from the Haydn centenary, with tributes to Gabriel Fauré by Maurice Ravel, Florent Schmitt, Charles Koechlin and others in 1922 (added to later by Arnold Bax, 1949[6]) and to Albert Roussel by Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and others (using various ciphering schemes) in 1929.
Honegger's system involved placing the letters after 'H' under sharpened and flattened notes,[3] an example of how chromatic cryptograms could be more easily accommodated in 20th-century music.
[7] Olivier Messiaen developed his own full cipher, involving pitches and note lengths, for his organ work Méditations sur le mystère de la Sainte Trinité (1969).
[12] During the first quarter of the 20th century, American author and occultist Paul Foster Case established an esoteric musical cryptogram for the purposes of ceremonial magick.
Ezra Sandzer-Bell has written and published two books on this subject,[14] describing how Paul Foster Case's system of musical cryptography could be applied to songwriting.
[15] Solfa Cipher, invented in 2013, uses a combination of scale degrees and rhythms to represent letters of the alphabet with the goal generating encrypted texts which sound like relatively normal singable melodies.
His work explores the intersection of encryption, symbolism, and artistic expression, offering a forward-thinking approach to cryptography in digital and musical formats.
This practice of integrating esoteric principles into modern compositions reflects his ongoing investigation into the cosmic and metaphysical aspects of music, much like the medieval thinkers who sought to understand the harmony of the spheres through sound.
