A Most Beautiful and Creative Way to Keep a Secret
An extravagant, deeply artistic method of cryptography.
Communicating a secret is one of those most eccentric of tasks, one capable of stimulating creativity. By a secret’s very nature, it’s logical that everything surrounding it is treated with care, dissimulation, hidden languages, and sometimes, risky missions. And sometimes, as has been said, the best place to hide a secret is right in plain sight.
This is precisely the case with musical cryptography, a method by which it’s possible to encode a message within a tune. The principle is simple because, as with other cryptic systems, it’s a translation from one language to another, and between sender and receiver there’s a key for deciphering the message.
At once, it’s both profoundly elegant and creative, not only because of the knowledge it requires in musical theory and technique. Even more so, because it takes place within music, among the noblest of artistic disciplines and indeed, for many, the most sublime.
It may seem at first to be a tale worthy of a detective or spy novel, but to the contrary, it’s very real. At least since the 17th-century, there have been testimonies as to musical cryptography’s use and even a few treatises written about it.
John Wilkins, famous for his appearance in one of the Jorge Luis Borges’ most acute essays, devoted a part of his interest in language to the field of cryptography. The result was his work Mercury, or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641). In Wilkins’ opinion, music is one of the best ways to hide and transmit secret messages, in part, because no one ever suspects of an innocent tune.
An illustrious contemporary of Wilkins, the philosopher and writer Francis Bacon also devoted himself to the art of disguising secrets within music. In Bacon’s case, this was achieved by devising a system in which each letter of the Latin alphabet corresponds to a certain number of notes A and B.
The cryptogram has also been used not just for secret but also for creative purposes. Johan Sebastian Bach, for example, codified his surname into a well-known fuge, as did Robert Schumann (in the piece Carnaval), but also Ravel, Claude Debussy, and even Dmitri Shostakovich.
Johannes Brahms was another musician who resorted to cryptography. But in Brahms’ case, it was with an almost magical intention. The composer was tormented by his frustrated relationship with Agathe von Siebold to whom he was on the point of marrying in the summer of 1858. He was 25 years of age and she was 23. Ten years later, Brahms composed a string sextet in which he included the name of his old fiancée in the lyrics (except for the T, for which there is no equivalent in the German musical notation, and with the particularity that, in this composition, H corresponds to the note E). Critics point out that the cryptogram A-G-A-H-E, during the first movement, is perhaps the greatest moment of relief from sorrow. “With this work, I’ve freed myself, at last, from love,” Brahms wrote to his friend Josef Gänsbacher on the piece, which entered his catalog as the Sextet for Strings No. 2 in G major, Op. 36.
Beyond mere anecdote, the story suggests another quality which makes music an ideal medium for the sharing of secrets: music can express the inexpressible (that’s why it is so sublime). It’s why music moves us: because it’s capable of giving meaning to what’s inside us, that which is sometimes well beyond words and language, or at least that which we’ve never elaborated sufficiently to make it accessible. For example, the pain of loss, as was the case with Brahms.
It can be said, then, that music doesn’t only conduct secrets which we can hope to decipher, but that it sometimes reveals other secrets we’ve never even suspected.
Related Articles
When ancient rituals became religion
The emergence of religions irreversibly changed the history of humanity. It’s therefore essential to ask when and how did ancient peoples’ rituals become organized systems of thought, each with their
Seven ancient maps of the Americas
A map is not the territory. —Alfred Korzybski Maps are never merely maps. They’re human projections, metaphors in which we find both the geographical and the imaginary. The cases of ghost islands
An artist crochets a perfect skeleton and internal organs
Shanell Papp is a skilled textile and crochet artist. She spent four long months crocheting a life-size skeleton in wool. She then filled it in with the organs of the human body in an act as patient
A musical tribute to maps
A sequence of sounds, rhythms, melodies and silences: music is a most primitive art, the most essential, and the most powerful of all languages. Its capacity is not limited to the (hardly trivial)
The enchantment of 17th-century optics
The sense of sight is perhaps one the imagination’s most prolific masters. That is why humankind has been fascinated and bewitched by optics and their possibilities for centuries. Like the heart, the
Would you found your own micro-nation? These eccentric examples show how easy it can be
Founding a country is, in some ways, a simple task. It is enough to manifest its existence and the motives for creating a new political entity. At least that is what has been demonstrated by the
Wondrous crossings: the galaxy caves of New Zealand
Often, the most extraordinary phenomena are “jealous of themselves” ––and they happen where the human eye cannot enjoy them. However, they can be discovered, and when we do find them we experience a
Think you have strange reading habits? Wait until you've seen how Mcluhan reads
We often forget or neglect to think about the infinite circumstances that are condensed in the acts that we consider habitual. Using a fork to eat, for example, or walking down the street and being
The sky is calling us, a love letter to the cosmos (video)
We once dreamt of open sails and Open seas We once dreamt of new frontiers and New lands Are we still a brave people? We must not forget that the very stars we see nowadays are the same stars and
The sister you always wanted (but made into a crystal chandelier)
Lucas Maassen always wanted to have a sister. And after 36 years he finally procured one, except, as strange as it may sound, in the shape of a chandelier. Maassen, a Dutch designer, asked the