After reading Adam Bregman’s fascinating piece about a fortuitous treatise-fragment discovery (“Day 1” of our stories),[1] I stumbled upon a great curiosity myself—one that impelled me to formally respond to Mr. Bregman as soon as possible, in the present manner. I encountered the work in question, an ostensibly anonymous essay enigmatically titled Vinyl Piper, by sheer chance during the course of unrelated research.[2] The text took me several weeks to contemplate, since the prose looks, paradoxically, like utter nonsense consisting only of fully recognizable English words. I eventually penetrated the cipher enough to reveal some kind of experimental musicological analysis of a twentieth-century musical composition: Aventures, by György Ligeti (1923-2006). (A recording can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdQse2lVh2k.)

As my nascent fluency in this peculiar code progressed, I realized to my astonishment that the subject of my scrutiny was in fact the brainchild of a significant—no, near-elemental—person from my early life. This individual was my closest confidant, the most sympathetic soul imaginable, but I cannot now in good faith divulge her name in print. To be clear, my dilemma is moral, not scholarly: After fifteen years of seemingly indissoluble bond, she abruptly severed ties with me nearly a decade ago, under unavoidably venomous circumstances. Worse, we could not have known at the time that her life was mere months away from its untimely end. I regrettably avoided reestablishing contact with her during the icy interim, before it was quite suddenly too late.[3]

Although centuries apart, the primary linguistic drive of my departed friend’s musicological analysis appears strikingly related to the title of the work Bregman’s recent article handles: Crass torrent prowl lucks, the only extant composition by the great English ars subtilior composers Malachus (ca. 1335-99) and Bregnatius (d. 1407).[4] I am still in the process of obtaining a copy of Crass torrent’s notated part-books for direct analysis (the singular manuscript source has not been digitized, nor to my knowledge is there a critical edition). Nevertheless, my urgency to publish comes from the potentially enormous musicological implications of the relationship between the text I will examine here and Crass torrent’s title, not just for Bregman’s particular interest but for our field’s understanding of fourteenth-century English musical symbol at large.

Before sharing with you any section of Vinyl Piper’s text in full (or venturing any connections between it and medieval thought), some explanation of the cipher itself is necessary for fruitful interpretation. As I mentioned, the code is comprised entirely of intelligible English words, but the words in their given combinations seem somehow completely meaningless. With section headings like “Lickety’s Adventures,” “Corn inclusion,” “Adventures Under Passed,” and “Lickety ant hiss Moose sickle Languish inn Adventures,” it is clear that, no matter the words’ abstract intelligibility in a grammatical vacuum, their forced context at the hands of grouping or order erases their usual connotations, effectively replacing them with the illusion of gibberish.

Unlike most word-games, puzzles, and cipher, no external “key” is necessary to render these phrases perfectly meaningful, it turns out. Rather, the magical deciphering of the code occurs not from any manipulation of lettering on the page, but exclusively in the beholder’s inner ear. True fluency, then, comes from cultivating robustly selective visual, aural, and connotative independence. I discovered this simple solution first strictly aurally, but some investigation into known English cipher involving “seemingly intact” words and homophones finally led me to the “Anguish Languish,” a 1940s invention by Howard L. Chace, professor of Romance languages at Miami University in Ohio.[5] Generally speaking, the Anguish Languish (“English Language,” in Anguish) is the result of the translation of normal English text entirely into homophones, or, preferably, generous approximations. From my close examination, Vinyl Piper is most certainly written in this manner—which explains its situation squarely between analysis and nonsense. In his introduction to the sole book on the Anguish Languish, Chace describes this phenomenon of word replacement-by-sound:

“An unbelievable number of English words, regardless of their usual meanings, can be substituted quite satisfactorily for others. When all the words in a given passage of English have been so replaced, the passage keeps its original meaning, but all the words have acquired new ones. A word that has received a new meaning has become a wart, and when all the words in the passage have become warts, the passage is no longer English; it’s Anguish.”[6]

As you might imagine, extensive written use of this language would present serious perceptual challenges to the unsuspecting reader. Really, Anguish requires a person to completely abandon all automatic responses to English words and instead trust the ear to gather all understanding of Anguish text. To complicate matters, there are no rules regarding the number of words to phonetically convey an expression. That means that even the same expression in two different places in the same work, paragraph, or even sentence, can be translated two different ways into Anguish, and neither needs to use the same number of words as the English version would. To ease these complications, Chace suggests that beginning Anguish learners develop their visual and auditory skills separately, by being read to before progressing to reading and writing.[7] Ironically, because of the subversion of visual experience in delivery, my informal (social-distance) trials have yielded highest success, not to mention hilarity, when a designated reader knows neither the premise of Anguish nor the content of the Anguish prose he or she is reading. Such a person is more likely to innocently and clearly articulate each Anguish wart according to expected English pronunciation rules—the only sure way to traverse a loosely homophonic text at first glance.[8]

But, in the context of serious musicological analysis, how does this cipher serve an ideological purpose, beyond clever amusement? I cannot speak for others who might regularly compose analyses in Anguish, but I found these sentences from Vinyl Piper’s “Corn inclusion” (conclusion) illuminating:

“…inn Lickety’s Adventures…Lickety crest-shuns languish bay crating has sewn. Hay crest-shuns on-dirt-sanding bay mucking is languish moose-sickly go-here-ant. Ant tat his watt Eye ham dew wing wit these vinyl piper. Eye aim strapping day warts under peach off tear meeting, bought an dew wing tat, Eye amp gaffing theme knew porpoise. Lick Lickety, Eye ham commuter-crating wit hue shrew deer plough-hers off yore roan inter-purr-tiff duels. Lick Lickety, Eye aim reel lazing may fission further moose-sick-cow-lady off languish, ant hits nest-is-scary roll inner moats bass sick on-dirt-sanding.”

[…in Ligeti’s Aventures…Ligeti questions language by creating his own. He questions understanding by making his language musically coherent. And that is what I am doing with this final paper. I am stripping the words on the page of their meaning, but in doing that, I am giving them new purpose. Like Ligeti, I am communicating with you through the powers of your own interpretive tools. Like Ligeti, I am realizing my vision for the musicality of language and its necessary role in our most basic understanding.][9]

In this excerpt, the author relates her musicological argument about Ligeti’s compositional procedure in a performative process of disconnecting and reconnecting the very media she describes as disconnected and reconnected in Ligeti’s work—sound and notation—through her own text’s unfolding. Amid these kaleidoscopic layers of symbol, one finds her moments of direct address especially dramatic, particularly when performed in a necessarily halting first reading of the original Anguish.

As we will see, my friend’s mention of this process as linguistic “repurposing” might prove especially relevant to Bregman’s findings. She lends pertinent musical-historical insights as well, in typical meta-methodological fashion, in her discussion of Ligeti’s Aventures’ relationship to music of the past (“Adventures Under Passed”):

“Lickety terns vices an toe hints-romance. Wren won locks a tall off Moose-sick Hysteria, these seams lick uh vary awed ding too dew. Way? Hints-romance half mime-ached vices stance be fair day Commune Pricked-us Peered. Whey notice farm olive day tree-tea-says awn hints-roam-mantel moose sick farm be fair day Broke, ante van farm right tens farm be fair day Reticence. Dare half bane tames wane focal lists half trite toe zing lick hints-romance, bout tease tames where alleyways shirt, ant moor a boat moose sickle stale then a boat sand (liken focal hoar-on gall an up “Past-floral” abhor a).”

[Ligeti turns voices into instruments. When one looks at all of Music History, this seems like a very odd thing to do. Why? Instruments have mimicked voices since before the Common Practice Period. We know this from all of the treatises on instrumental music from before the Baroque and even from writings from before the Renaissance. There have been times when vocalists have tried to sing like instruments, but these times were always short and more about musical style than about sound (like a vocal horn call in a “Pastoral” opera).]

Here, the author explains Ligeti’s intentional subversion of the typical roles of voices as carriers of textual meaning and instruments as (often) subordinate imitators of that text. In doing so, she also highlights earlier practices of instrument-voice material sharing and affective imitation across the Western musical canon (her pastoral example falls under the category of what we often call musical “topic”). While I would not expect to find identical affective techniques unilaterally across the time periods she cites, the concept of destabilizing existing tools in media, structure, and presentation, effortlessly transposes to the medieval concept of coniunctae, for which Malachus and Bregnatius were best known. Just like Ligeti’s experimental role-subversion, musical conjunction by definition “freeze day moose sick farm trod-rational languish (jest has English freeze farm Anguish)…ant terns Moose-sick Hysteria hop site town.”[10]

In light of all that we can glean about homophones and word “repurposing” as central to Vinyl Piper’s aims and construction, I would like to turn finally to the details in Bregman’s article that sparked this response. First and most importantly, while Chace’s term “Anguish Languish” itself may not have existed before the 1940s, Crass torrent prowl lucks’ title, like “Vinyl Piper,” performs Anguish’s characteristic linguistic homophone operation. Next, consider this footnote, potential elaboration of which will prove essential to our future exploration of this topic:

“[1.] Although the text of [Crass torrent prowl lucks] was written in a dialect yet to be identified, the title seems to be a unique spelling of Castor et Pollux (the twin half-brothers born to Leda, seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan, as well as her own husband), where the word breaks sever the syllables of each of the three words, creating four new ones.”[11]

After encountering Vinyl Piper, I now appreciate what appears fairly innocent on the surface to serve as unlikely portal to a labyrinthine symbolic network uniting the linguistic (“trivial”), numerical (“quadrivial”), and Theosophical arts. I understand the improbable-sounding breadth of this claim: Bregman relates elsewhere in his prose that virtually nothing is known about Bregnatius nor Malachus, aside from their having been creative partners and English champions of continental musical coniunctae.[12] Inaccessible by way of purely musicological research, however, it seems that the key lies in Magister Malachus’ biography, which exists quite a bit more intact than we thought. While working on yet another unrelated project (outside of music), I unearthed several tantalizing details about Malachus, heretofore unknown to musicology:

1. A highly respected music theorist and instrumentalist in his day, Malachus was apparently best known as a poet, not a musician, much like his contemporary Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377). But unlike Machaut, whom both poetry and music today “claim” as their own, already by the sixteenth century Malachus belonged exclusively to literary history.[13]

2. His surviving poetic verse has been shown to consistently hinge, in terms of construction, on intense numerical-proportional symmetries and rigorous mathematical calculation.[14]

3. He evidently signed his poetic works with equal frequency as “Malachus,” “Chalamus” (an unconcealed anagram),[15]and “Geber”—the last two of which raise serious questions about the poet’s intellectual proclivities, according to certain tenets of early-modern Chemistry and Natural Philosophy. In particular, the union of rich chemical subtext contained in “Chalamus” (in reference to “calamus,” the biblical medicinal herb) and “Geber” (a famous ninth-century alchemist, rediscovered in the fourteenth century), to the initiated, indicates certain fluency in the alchemical arts.[16]

If Malachus indeed intended this confluence of his own monikers to be discernable as thinly veiled alchemical allusion, then—especially considering his documented predilection for number symbolism—one could expect to find some degree of “Anguish”-engaged poetic encryption, with alchemical implications, within the text of Crass torrent prowl lucks. Although not in these precise terms, Bregman has already identified at least one such provocative feature: the linguistic operation of transforming the three-word name “Castor et Pollux” into four, “Crass torrent prowl lucks.” This textual operation may well be a sly nod to the foundational alchemical principle that “multiplicity springs from unity.”[17]It also recalls the massive body of theological symbolism surrounding the Pythagorean tetraktys (1, 2, 3, and 4—summative parts of the “circle” number ten—expressed as a figural triangle), which appeared in mystical contexts even before the Pythagoreans, in non-Greek societies.[18] This is hardly the place for extensive numerological exegesis, but the model I suggest, at its core, maps the following progression: twins (Castor and Pollux) conceived in the “unity” of a single mother’s goose egg (despite different fathers), separated into duality upon hatching, then given a three-word composite name, which Crass torrent prowl lucks, through homophone transmutation, finally rearranges into four words with near-identical aural result.[19] Perhaps when the full text of Crass torrent becomes available to me, I can reassess the validity of this kind of quadrivial-allegorical reading.

For now, simply consider this: No matter the century, any use of the Anguish Languish—titular or pervasive—necessarily strips auditory meaning from visual experience, and visual logic from phonetic association. It thereby starkly highlights the intrinsic fluidity and interrelatedness of language, music, perception, and understanding. As we musicologists must remember, all musicians, from Malachus and Bregnatius to Ligeti and beyond, spend their lives constantly questioning the intelligibility of musical language and rhetoric; but it is all too rare that we encounter art such as theirs, that invites us (so explicitly as in Anguish) to question the musical intelligibility of the spoken language that surrounds us and structures our ideas. From what we can gather of her analysis of Aventures, my late friend must have believed that if we do not separate the sounds of our language from their imposed meanings, as moose-itch-things, tinkers, and commuter craters, we do ourselves a great musical disservice. We cannot afford to leave the expressive possibilities of our most widely used communicative tool unexplored any more than we can take the rhetorical potential of musical artistry for granted.

Malachai Komanoff Bandy

South Pasadena, May 2020