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Do you think this is the correct solution to Elgar's enigma?

  • Yes

    Votes: 4 18.2%
  • No

    Votes: 4 18.2%
  • Maybe

    Votes: 14 63.6%

Elgar's Enigma Breakthrough

13K views 44 replies 20 participants last post by  Vaneyes 
#1 ·
1. Elgar's Enigma Variations (EV) written in 1898 were about his "circle" of friends. Pi is a constant in all circles. Pi is the circumference divided by its diameter.

2. Pi is usually approximated as 3.142 as a decimal, or 22/7 as a fraction.

3. The first four notes of EV are scale degree 3-1-4-2, decimal Pi.

4. There is a drop of a seventh in bars 3 and 4.

5. These 2/7 follow exactly after the first 11 notes. ie: 11 x 2/7 = 22/7, fractional Pi.

(The first seven bars may be viewed in "Wikipedia, Enigma Variations"- I tried to cut and paste but it did not work here.)

6. Elgar wrote EV in the year following the widely ridiculed Indiana Pi Bill of 1897 which attempted to legislate the value of Pi.

7. In a programme note for the 1899 first performance, Charles A. Barry rendered Elgar's own words:
The Enigma I will not explain - its 'dark saying' must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the connection between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme 'goes', but is not played.... So the principal Theme never appears, even as in some late dramas ... the chief character is never on the stage.

8. Elgar's "dark saying" could be, "Four and twenty blackbirds (dark) baked in a Pie (Pi). Within the first six bars there are exactly "Four and twenty black notes (with "wings" as ties/slurs) baked in a "Pi".

9. Theme in the "literary" sense is the central concept or idea of a work. Pi is the Theme which "never appears", although the melody derived from Pi in the first six measures is heard through out as the "Original Theme".

10. Elgar often said that the enigma was "well known." Pi is taught to nearly everyone as part of a basic education.

11. In 1929 Elgar was 72 years old, in ill-health and many of his friends had died. He probably wanted to leave some confirmation of the enigma's solution in case it were solved after his death. He wrote 3 sentences for release of his EV pianola rolls. These three sentences contain 3 hints at fractional Pi.

The alternation of the two quavers and two crotchets in the first bar and their reversal in the second bar will be noticed; references to this grouping are almost continuous (either melodically or in the accompanying figures - in Variation XIII, beginning at bar 11 [503], for example). The drop of a seventh in the Theme (bars 3 and 4) should be observed. At bar 7 (G major) appears the rising and falling passage in thirds which is much used later, e.g. Variation III, bars 10.16. [106, 112] - E.E.

12. In the first sentence he wrote of two quavers and two crotchets- at hint at "22" (of 22/7).

13. In the second sentence he referred to the drop of the seventh in 3rd and 4th bar.

14. In the third sentence he referred to "bar 7" which is a hint at "/7" of 22/7.

15. Elgar wrote that "The EV were begun in a spirit of humour."

16. Elgar was known for his interest in puzzles and his love of japes (jokes).

I think this is the enigma solution? What do YOU think?
 
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#40 ·
Please indulge this irrelevant addition to the discussion :p

A classical geometrician, a mathematician, and an engineer, are asked to define pi.
Geometrician: 'It is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter'.
Mathematician: 'It is an irrational and transcendant constant defined as twice the smallest positive x, x being in radians, for which cos(x) equals zero'.
Engineer: 'It's about 3'.
 
#41 ·
That's good! I am obviously not a mathematician but I can relate to the other two.

If you asked a composer (Edward Elgar) he would tell you it that Pi is 3.142, 22/7, or a dark saying (a pun inside a nursery rhyme, "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a "Pi".)
 
#42 ·
I loathe all the mathematicians who are constantly trying to fit their numbers to art in general. There is something so horribly and plainly wrong about the need to quantify everything, especially the arts. It is almost pathological.

This is a case of where numbers Always Lie, because they can be so fit to anything along with a little rationale.

If art could be quantified, there would be a tidy list of who actually were / are the best composers: those lists would not at all vary if the 'system' used to quantify them was 'at the truth of it.'

You can't reduce everything to numbers, any more than you can reduce it all to musical notes.

Never cared about these literal - associative things attached to music. Don't care of whom those 'musical portraits' are.
I don't even find Elgar at all palatable.
 
#43 · (Edited)
A piano teacher somehow got off on her own tangent when I was in a lesson and working on a Chopin piece. The digression had to do with all the suggested motivations behind the piece, what he was thinking, feeling, of which there are myriad and all insupportable by any directly attributable documentation whatsoever.

As she wound it down, she came to a very dry and matter of fact dismissal of it all, "Me, I don't care if he had a toothache when he wrote it."

This is your kind of pleasure, a kind of pleasure, frankly, that I think has nothing to do with the music and more with a true compulsion -- bordering on a clinical obsession -- to define anything you might sense as 'ordered' in your own terms and on your own turf - with math.

Even if it were provable (many here have been in their posts, while polite, quietly but hysterically funny about dismissing your theorem) I believe the whole procedure and preoccupation on your part is 100% obstructive to your meeting this piece head-on, unarmed, and letting it really work on you. The Art Of Music, when presented, should be received in complete openness, and trust, so the music itself can do its work on you. That requires a giving up of self and real trust in, after all, what is nothing but bent air.

ADD: But I omitted the key thing. Artists primarily think within the modes of their craft and medium: that mode of thinking is their first impulse.

Math, or an orange peel next to a cup and saucer with tea dregs in it, and the supposed random placement of those objects on the table, and perhaps the crease in the table cloth at just that place... can trigger and catalyze a purely musical thought, and without any steps to account for in transliterating thought, immediately suggest musical events or a structure.

You see all from a math perspective, compelled, evidently, to do so. Thus the artist has all other manner of things and objects from other disciplines as their catalysts, but are too, compelled to think as artists - if Elgar had been thinking math, I can guarantee you it would not have guaranteed his choice of pitches if they did not first suit his ear.

To think otherwise, to parse this most abstract and plastic of the arts out with math or the literal rhetoric of verbal logic, is to fail to get anywhere near what an artist does, and that keeps you, I think, sadly, at a far remove from directly receiving what they did do. It keeps forever on the 'outside of music,' and it will never be in you. That makes me want to offer you commiseration more than anything, because its pull on you must nonetheless be great.

"I chose to paint water lilies, but it could have been anything." ~ Claude Monet
 
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