Monogram - one of the mysterious phenomena in the art of music. It is a musical cipher in the form of an alphabetic complex composed on the basis of the name of the author of a musical work or the names of people dear to him. To create such a cipher, "hidden" in the music, the letter and syllable notation is used.
Compiling a monogram requires great creative ingenuity, given that it contains not only a constructive beginning, but also bears a certain subtext of a musical composition. The authors of the letters themselves and the diaries revealed the riddle of the cipher.
The monogram that survived the centuries
Musical monograms exist in the works of composers of different times and peoples. In the Baroque era, the monogram occurs most often as part of thematic material of two significant musical genres - fantasy and fugue, which reached perfection in the works of I.S. Baha.
Surname BACH can be represented as a musical monogram: B-flat (B) -a (A) -to (C) -Ci-bécar (H). It is often found in the composer’s works, dissolving into musical tissue, acquiring the meaning of a symbol. I.S. Bach was a deeply religious person, his music is communion with God (conversation with God). The composer does not use the monogram to perpetuate his own name, but to express a kind of musical missionary work.
As a tribute to the great IS Bahu, his monogram sounds in the works of many other composers. Today, more than 400 works are known, whose compositional basis is the motive BACH. The Bach monogram in the subject of F. Liszt’s fugues from his Prelude and the subject of BACH’s fugues is very vividly heard.
The secret meaning of one monogram
In the XIX century. musical monograms are the intonation beginning of many works of romantic composers, closely adjoining to the principle of monothematism. Romanticism colors monogram in personality tone. Sound codes capture the innermost world of the creator of musical composition.
In the charming "Carnival" by R. Schumann, throughout the whole work, persistent variation of the motive is heard A-Es-C-H, it contains the monogram of the composer (Scha) and the name of the small Czech town of Ash (ASCH)where young Schumann met his first love. The author opens to the listener the construction of musical ciphers of the piano cycle in the play "Sphinxes".
Monograms in modern music
The music of the past and present centuries characterizes the strengthening of the rational beginning. Perhaps that is why musical monograms and anagrams (rearrangement of the signs of the source code) are so often found in the musical compositions of modern authors. In some creative solutions found by composers, they acquire the value of an ideal that goes back to the spiritual values of the past (as in the case of the monogram BACH), in others, a deliberate distortion of the high value of the musical code is detected, and even its transformation into a negative direction. And sometimes the code is a kind of fun for the composer, inclined to humor.
For example, N.Ya. Myaskovsky softly joked over his teacher in the composition class AK Lyadov, using the original motif - B-re-gis - La-do-fa, which means translated from "musical language" - "beware Lyadov" (Third string quartet, a second part of the 1st part).
Known monograms D.D. Shostakovich - DEsCH and R. Shchedrin - SH CHED merged in "Dialogue with Shostakovich," written by R.K. Shchedrin. An outstanding master of creating musical ciphers, Shchedrin wrote the opera "Lefty" and dedicated it to the 60th anniversary of the conductor Valery Gergiev, using the nominal monogram of the hero of the day in the music of this interesting work.
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