A rare example of a strict quadruple canon (eight voices from four), Jean Mouton’s Nesciens Mater is a crowning jewel of early 16^th-century contrapuntal technique. Yet perhaps Mouton’s greatest achievement with the motet is in the extent he manages to disguise the canon in an “elegant ‘finish’—the seemingly effortless art that conceals study, that quality so prized by Renaissance culture” (Marvin 2002, ix). Building on Peter Schubert’s (2007) suggestion that form in Renaissance polyphony presents through fluctuations in “contrapuntal intensity,” I propose an analytical approach that foregrounds exactly what Mouton worked so hard to conceal: the compositional effort—hidden beneath the surface—inherent to the employment of such a limiting technique.

A little-known compositional treatise from seventeenth-century England, Elway Bevin’s A Briefe and Short Instruction of the Art of Musicke (1631; Bevin and Collins 2007), presents imitative canonic techniques as the ultimate musical achievement: a marriage of symbolic patterns with notated sound. Bevin’s canons are representative examples of musical riddles, an Early Modern subgenre consisting of performable pieces imbued with esoteric significance. The significance of a riddle is not conveyed through sound alone: insiders can only discern it by puzzling over the score and related text. Musical riddles, then, are oriented toward players rather than toward an audience, flouting the dominant listener-focused aesthetics of the period.

This paper demonstrates how insights from current philosophies of games can shed light on the Early Modern practice of musical riddling. In particular, C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art (2020) offers a flexible theory of games within a player-centric aesthetic framework, which is not provided by Early Modern music-theoretical writings. Indeed, Zarlino—a strong influence on all early theorists and practitioners of musical canons, including Bevin—had argued that compositional “intricacies” which do not appeal directly to an audience’s sense of hearing “have no value at all” (Zarlino et al. 1983, 263). As this dismissal is echoed by most of Bevin’s contemporaries (Schiltz 2015), the persistence of musical riddles throughout the Early Modern period is difficult to account for on seventeenth-century terms. However, by applying aspects of Nguyen’s approach in an analysis of Bevin’s “Five Wounds” canon, this paper explains the appeal of musical riddles: these puzzling objects afford players an aesthetic experience of their own agency, engaging performers’ senses and imagination as they struggle to complete in-game goals. Layers of significance in “Five Wounds” are hidden to listeners, apparent only to performers—an outstanding example of how sensory and intellectual dimensions come together in the participant-focused aesthetics of this genre. Adopting Nguyen’s framework, this paper guides its audience through the game of Bevin’s “Five Wounds” canon, showing how Early Modern musical riddles offer players a powerful experience of music-making that transcends the sonic and opens interpretive possibilities for performers past and present.

Canonic procedure, central to Ligeti's compositional thought throughout his career, played an especially important role in the 1980s, as his style was undergoing a major transformation. This can be seen most clearly in notes and sketches from the collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. I will present recent archival research centered on Ligeti’s work on the first movement of his Piano Concerto from 1980–1986, identifying and chronologically organizing 71 distinct attempts to draft a beginning for the first movement. The majority of these sketches explore ideas for a 12-tone mensural canon inspired by Ligeti's discovery of Conlon Nancarrow in 1980, and those fall into two distinct phases, the second of which is based on an idea for proportionally related abstract backgound rhythms that he would eventually use in the fourth movement. In the earlier phase Ligeti develops a block-canon technique in which he controls the canon by inserting variable pauses in an otherwise strict mensural canon. I will present additional manifestations of the block-canon method in the “Spiegelkanon” movement of Magyar Etüdök and Ligeti’s working drafts of the Piano Concerto second and fifth movements from 1986, which are especially illuminating windows into his compositional process.