Kyburz's Voynich Cipher Manuscript

[Grant Covell <GCovell@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Friends--

Over two months ago I offered to provide more info about the recently cited
musical composition that draws upon the Voynich ms.
Here finally are some notes.

Hanspeter Kyburz (b. 1960): The Voynich Cipher Manuscript, for mixed chorus
and ensemble, 1995
recording:
	Donaueschinger Musiktage 1995
	col legno WWE 3CD 31898
	Sudfunk-Chor Stuttgart
	Klangforum Wien
	conducted by Rupert Huber
	recording of the first performance: Oct. 22, 1995
	22:11

The Donaueschinger Musiktage is an annual festival of contemporary music in
Donaueschingen, Germany. The CD label col legno has issued yearly
compilations, 1995's is a 3CD set. Somewhat hard to find, col legno discs
come close to the USD 20 price or more. Their website is:
http://www.col-legno.de/ where this set is priced at EURO 38,29 (??!!) and
DM 75,00.

Hanspeter Kyburz's Notes are in German and English, here is the English:

"The 232-page long Voynich Cipher Manuscript is written in a secret code
what has not been deciphered to this day: the most distinguished experts on
secret codes have failed in the task, as has linguistic computer research
which has been going on for years, although all structural approaches seem
to rule out the possibility of its being a nonsensical text.
"In the 16th century the manuscript was bought and sold for astronomical
prices because it was assumed to be an "elixir of life": the German Emperor
Rudolph II bought it for 600 gold ducats from the famous English man of
learning Dr. John Dee, who as court astrologer, geographer, mathematician,
necromancer and chief spy in one person later became the model for
Shakespeare's Prospero in The Tempest. The fantastic illustrations, which
also bore detailed written explanations, show unknown blossoms and spices as
well as nymphs in a widely-branching network of funnels and tubes, strange
inventions and start constellations which do not exist. They suggest a
medicinal-astrological interpretation and probably represent the main reason
why most researchers have been animated to attempt translations.
"In spite of the positive results of syntactic analyses, the adventurous
source history of the manuscript and the suggestive vividness of the
illustrations, it has not been possible right up to the present day to
reconstruct the significance of this text and with it the background of the
author's experience.
"From the many fragmentary and speculative "solutions", which have always
been refuted within a very short time, I have selected several passages as
text material: series of numbers which are intended to lay the strange
letters open to analysis, Latin and English syllables and series of words
building on these etc.
"Thus the object of the composition is the process of the formation of
meaning, in that hermetic material dissolves in the double motion of
translation, demanding not only the comparative approach to the past but
also the constructive creation of new contexts. The investigation by playing
all of these complex dynamic of translation with all their imponderabilities
is the basic concept of the piece.
"At three central points poems by Velimir Chlebnikov are also recited in the
translation by Oskar Pastior. Chlebnikov's futuristic-archaic "star
language", which oscillates between abstract constructions and etymological
intensification, demands an alchemistic, micro-synthetic method of
translation (Pastior), which makes it possible to express Chlebnikov's
speech-renewing intentions as well as his tendency towards secrecy and
poetic encipherment.

<<poems cited>>

"I would like to dedicate this piece to Oskar Pastior, not without the hope
that he, too, may one day occupy himself with the "star language" of the
Voynich Manuscript."

But what does it sound like? The work opens gently, with quiet murmurings
that eventually open into a more fluid section with solo voices, orchestra
and chorus, each group exploring fragmentary material. There is delicate use
of percussion and piano, and solo instruments and voices emerge and recede
from the fragmentary texture. The Chlebnikov poems lead to more vigorous
sections with more forceful vocal declamation and louder accompanying
orchestral and choral textures.

Personal comments: The sound world is 20th century atonal contemporary
classical. I find the work too "standard" given the subject, as the piece
reflects the gestures and colors I associate with atonal contemporary music.
The chorus does give into occasional laughing and shouting, but I find the
use of "text" too conventional. The work tries to use the some-what nonsense
text on a syllabic level, but as the surrounding sounds are standard and
traditional, it's hard to accept the syllables as sound objects.

Personally, I would probably have created an intentionally non-standard
ensemble (30 violins, or tape, or percussion and low brass) to reflect the
current impenetrability of the work, to reflect how removed the ms is from
our current understanding. Any attempt to create music around the Voynich ms
should reflect some amount of loss of meaning, that is, the music must
intentionally represent a fragment, or be itself flawed or incomplete,
almost perhaps as if it were an academic exercise. I would have preferred a
text that is more fragmentary, or organized in a way that would remove its
intended meaning (nonsense syllables sorted by frequency, by length, etc.).

Aside: I've been taken by the relatively recent discussion to convert the ms
into sound (or bitmap) by mapping each character to a sound (or pixel).
While mapping characters to recognizable pitches seems like a reasonable
approach, the fact that the pitch spectrum would impose an order (some
pitches would be low, some high) and that we'd come to assign some
characters with low notes and some with high would become distracting. I'd
go for the musique concrete approach: creating a library of short but
diverse non-pitched sounds which taken as a whole would have no intrinsic
order or progression (noise, sounds from nature, mechanical sounds, but very
short so that they'd not be recognizable).

Grant.