The Art of Musical Ciphers, Riddles and Sundry Curiosities

Offers the first comprehensive account of a centuries-old tradition of encrypting covert messages into music, from the Middle Ages to the present day.


What do J. S. Bach, beef cabbage, coffee, the SATOR Square, and Marlene Dietrich have in common? Composers have enciphered these and many other words into music.

Since time immemorial riddles have intrigued us, partly for their mirthful manner of connecting incongruous ideas, partly for their arresting way of opening fresh perspectives on our shared human condition. When we think of riddles, we normally recall verbal conundrums from cultures around the globe. But riddles can penetrate non-verbal aspects of our existence as well. Masking messages in music so that they lurk beneath the sonorous surface is an august Western tradition spanning the Middle Ages to the present. Known as musical cryptography, these puzzling pursuits form the subject of this book, construed broadly enough to capture not just musical ciphers and codes but also a curiosity shop of related techniques, which arguably can advance the greater virtue. They entertain, edify, and enthral, but also bewitch and bewilder, and, when unsolved, perplex and perturb.

R. LARRY TODD is Arts & Sciences Professor at Duke University

KATHARINA UHDE is Associate Professor of Violin and Musicology, Valparaiso University; and Akademische Oberrätin, LMU Munich