The History of a Cipher, 1602-1772

Author(s): H. Neville Davies

Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Oct., 1967), pp. 325-329
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/733227
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THE HISTORY OF A CIPHER, I602-1772

BY H. NEVILLE DAVIES

READERS OF Eric Sams's articles in the Musical Times on Schumann's

use of ciphers (August I965, May 1966 and December I966) may
be interested to read about another musical cipher. They may also
like to try their luck at detecting the cipher in contexts more musical

than those in which I have found it. I first met the cipher in a

seventeenth-century science fiction story, Bishop Francis Godwin's

'The Man in the Moone: or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither'

(i638).1 Domingo Gonsales, the hero of this highly entertaining

romance, is conveyed, by an extraordinary flying chariot, to the
world in the moon, where he finds an equally extraordinary utopian
civilization. Of special interest is the lunar language, which includes
words that depend not on articulation but on variation of pitch, "so
as if they [the Lunars] list theywill utter their mindes by tunes without

wordes". Two examples of these 'tunes' are given. The first is "an
ordinary salutation amongst them, signifying (Verbatim) Glorie be
to God alone, which they expresse (as I take it, for I am no perfect
Musitian) by this tune without any words at all":

? T I i T T I T 1
The second example is the name of their visitor, Gonsales:

O I I 0 T 'T T

Another seventeenth-century bishop, John Wilkins, has

his 'Mercury: or the Secret and Swift Messenger' (I641)

two examples of lunar language employ a simple substitutio

though the lunar greeting must be translated into Latin ('G

soli') before encipherment. The system used is this:

A b c d E f g h I I m n 0 p r sV t wx Y z

r F f r r v J . . J

There are a few discrepancies between t

the Moone' and the form they should tak
'Mercury', but these are insufficient to th
that Godwin used the system explained by

1 There are two inexpensive paperback editions

the Moone' (Hereford, 1959), and an inferior text in

Seventeenth Century' (New York, i963).
325

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Moone' was published posthumously, and this may account for the
errors.

I have discussed this whole matter at length elsewher

made suggestions about Godwin's sources.2 If I am ri

most important of these are an account of the tonal
Chinese language in a redaction of the journals of M
the founder of the Jesuit mission in Peking, and a m
explained and demonstrated by Della Porta in the lat

his celebrated work on cryptography, 'De Furtivis Liter

(1602):

I ..e.o*e o o T T T T t k T i

a b c d c f g h i I m n o p q r s t u x yz

Godwin seems to have copied the genera

changed all the variables, in order to be di

the top line of the stave to one leger line b
ing minims and semibreves instead of hav
all of the other, and by beginning with

semibreve.

A similar cipher-system is explained in two other seventeenthcentury treatises on cryptography. In the pseudonymous Hercules de

Sunde's 'Steganologia et Steganographia' (c. 1620) Daniel Schwenter

included the following system, which was later copied by Gasper
Schott in his 'Schola Steganographia' (Nurenburg, 1665):'

.. o ?4???""" I" nl=, i

b a c d e f 1 h i k I m n o y z r s t u w x q p

Schott follows his treatment of Schwenter's system

he prefers, and which is very like Porta's:

a b c d e f g h i k 1 m no p q r s t u w x y z

These are the only examples of such cipher-s

before the eighteenth century, but I feel sure
have been known by musicians after its inclusi
in I602, and probably earlier. Furthermore, I f
known by musicians it would have been used b

perhaps, have been used in an attempt to u

powerfully to produce the Orphic effetti wh
strove so hard to achieve. It could well have be
the music itself the sort of compliment paid b
(I603), or to express ingeniously and musically
correspondences explained in the dedicatory

2 'Bishop Godwin's "Lunatique language",' Journal of t

Institutes, xxx (I967).

8 See 'Bishop Godwin's "Lunatique language".'

326

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(I612-13). Where 'singularity', to use Eric Sams's word, in the

music of this period disturbs musicians, it may be worth considering

the possibility that a musical cipher is involved, and ascertaining

whether one of the systems which I have reproduced is being used.

There is further reference to a cipher of the same type in the

eighteenth century. In 772 Philip Thicknesse published 'A Treatise
on the Art of Decyphering, and of Writing in Cypher. With an
Harmonic Alphabet', in which he included an improved version of
the musical cipher which he found in Wilkins's 'Mercury'. Wilkins
had written: "I suppose these letters and notes might be disposed to

answer one another, with better advantage than here they are
expressed. And this perhaps, would be easie enough for those that

are thoroughly versed in the grounds of Musick, unto whose further

enquiry I do here only propose this invention". Thicknesse, who

was an enthusiastic amateur musician, though, as he admitted, "not

sufficiently cunning in the art of musick, to get my bread by it",4

accepted the challenge and attempted to produce a musical cipher

that would not be open to the objection that "the want of time, and

harmony... would create suspicion, and that would soon produce

a discovery" ('A Treatise', p. 37). He explains:
The specimen the Bishop [Wilkins] has given by writing GLORIA
DEO SOLI by minims, on musical lines, will instantly appear to any

one, the least conversant with music; that being without harmony or
time, it must have no meaning, or that some hidden matter is thereby

disguised. I shall therefore endeavour to write down an alphabet by

musical notes, in such a manner that even a master of music shall
not suspect it is to convey any meaning, but that which is obvious;
and I am persuaded an alphabet by musical notes may be so contrived, that the notes shall not only convey the harmony, but the

very words of the song, so that a music-master (which is too often his

design) may instruct his female pupil, not only how to play upon
the instrument, but how to play the fool at the same time, and to
impose upon her parents or guardians, by hearkening to his folly,

impertinence, or wickedness. When a musick-master has once

taught his female pupil to understand a musical alphabet, and she

will permit him to carry on a secret correspondence, he may send

her daily, a lesson which she may repent having learnt, as long as she

lives (pp. 43-44).

Thicknesse's main interest in his 'harmonic alphabet' seems to be

in the possibilities it offers for amorous intrigue, enabling music

masters, in true comedy tradition, to seduce their pupils, and lovers

to arrange through "the notes of Lady Coventry's minuet... an

assignation in Grosvenor Square" (p. 70). A similar situation is

dramatised in Moliere's 'Le Malade imaginaire' (II, v):

Argan: Montrez-moi ce papier. Ha, ha. Oh sont donc les paroles que
vous avez dites ? II n'y a la que de la musique ecrite ?

Cleante: Est-ce que vous ne savez pas, Monsieur, qu'on a trouve

depuis peu l'invention d'ecrire les paroles avec les notes memes?

Thicknesse, 'A Year's Journey Through France and Part of Spain', 2nd ed.

(London, I778), i, p. II5.

327

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The other advantage stressed by Thicknesse is that it would make it

possible to "communicat the words of a song, by the same vehicle,

which points out the time and the harmony" (p. 68), though he

does not seem to be interested in using this to increase the significance

of the music or to create a specially meaningful or powerful relation-

ship between words and music. Instead, he sees it as a convenience

to the performer: "If the words of a song, could be thus conveyed
by the notes, as well as the air, it would, exclusive of the contrivance,

be of infinite service and ease, for ladies who sing" (p. 46).
Thicknesse's cipher allows two more letters than Wilkins's and

so uses the leger line above the stave, the leger line below the stave,

and the space below that leger line. The pairing of musical notes
with letters of the alphabet attempts to facilitate the matching of
common groups of letters with viable musical figures:

4? j J J J J rFr; r rJ j J r f f
t a e i o u s 1 n r y x q k w b f c d m p h g z

The attempt is not very successful, though some com

consonants are arranged to fit adjacent notes (ph, sl, g

Ip), and some common pairs of letters are exactly

(qu, th, wh,fr, er, an). The vowels are concentrated i

the range, and the least frequently used consonant
the two extremities of the range. In order to demon
Thicknesse provides two examples of messages in
straightforward encipherment of a couplet by G
Thicknesse claims that "if a musick-master be req
he will certainly think it an odd, as well as a ver
composition; but neither he nor any other person, w
the notes convey also the two following harmonio
His second example is more complicated, for he sets
that of love can be expresed/In these soft numbers s
out the melody and bass lines of a short minuet mov
most of the notes are nulls with tails pointing up, an
carry the message have their tails pointing down.
Thicknesse had hoped to interest the musical pr
'harmonic alphabet' so that an able composer woul
piece of music like his second example, but with m

or with none at all:

Conscious ... of my own inability to execute a matter of so much

ingenuity with any degree of success, I applied to Dr. A[rn]e, and
made him acquainted with my faint idea of the business, and asked
his assistance. But though the Doctor is undoubtedly an excellent
composer of music, I more than suspect by his total silence! that

he has not the most distant idea, of what I thought I had laid

before him in very plain notes. I am sure it was in very civil terms.

If it be asked, why I applied to the father and not to the son, I

328

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answer, because he might have expected me, in return, to employ

him to teach my daughter music, and I do not like his manner (pp.
83-5).

Thicknesse is remembered mainly for his quarrels, and his

remarks about Arne and his natural son Michael are typical of his
aggressive manner. In 1772, the year in which Thicknesse's 'Treatise'
was published, Michael Arne, then a young man of 32, was travelling

in Germany with a pupil, Miss Ann Venables, his late wife, the
singer Elizabeth Wright, having died in I769. In I773 he married
Ann Venables on the fourth anniversary of his first wife's death.

Perhaps when Thicknesse wrote of music teachers instructing their

female pupils "not only how to play upon the instrument, but how
to play the fool at the same time" he had in mind Ann Venables and
Michael Arne, travelling in Germany together and not yet married."

In spite of his disappointment with "the ingenious Doctor" Thicknesse was still convinced "that a good composer of music, either by

framing the harmony by the alphabet, or the alphabet by the

harmony, may not only render every note active, but by the har-

monic alphabets, might write two letters on different subjects, one

in the treble cliff, and the other in the bass" (p. 85). He seems not

to have known Porta's musical cipher, the quotations of lunar

language in 'The Man in the Moone', or the ciphers of Schwenter

and Schott, but Wilkins's reference to Godwin's book and the
language which "is fancied to be usual amongst the Lunary Inhabitants" is not entirely ignored:

I have observed elsewhere, that Bishop Wilkins just hints at the

method of writing by musical notes, and he is the only writer, I
believe, who ever mentioned this method; though I think I have
somewhere read, that there was a people (but I doubt they were
inhabitants of the moon) who conversed entirely by musical instruments; and I have several times wished, that were the case with us,
when I have heard a parcel of men talking together:- Harmony
might then make one some amends (p. 90).

Thicknesse's 'Treatise' may, perhaps, have encouraged William

Hooper to include 'The musical cypher' as recreation No. 50 in the
first volume of his 'Rational Recreations, In Which the Principles
of Numbers and Natural Philosophy Are Clearly and Copiously
Elucidated, By a Series of Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experi-

ments' (I774). This was published two years after Thicknesse's

book, but there is no similarity between Hooper's cipher and any

of the ones which I have discussed. Hooper describes and illustrates
a cipher-wheel that is, in general and in many particulars, comparable

with Table 2 of Johann Kliiber's 'Kryptographik' (I809), reproduced on the cover of the Musical Times (May 1966).

6 The circumstances of Thicknesse's own first two marriages were particularly

strange, involving the spectacular abduction of an heiress and the remarkable elopement
of a celebrated singer. See Philip Gosse, 'Dr. Viper: The Querulous Life of Philip Thick-

nesse' (London, 1952).

329

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