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Dorabella Cipher
The Dorabella Cipher is an enciphered letter written by composer Edward Elgar to Dora Penny, which was accompanied by another dated July 14, 1897. Penny never deciphered it and its meaning remains unknown. The cipher, consisting of 87 characters spread over 3 lines, appears to be made up from 24 symbols, each symbol consisting of 1, 2, or 3 approximate semicircles oriented in one of 8 directions (the orientation of several characters is ambiguous). A small dot appears after the fifth character on the third line. Background Dora Penny (1874–1964) was the daughter of the Reverend Alfred Penny (1845–1935) of Wolverhampton. Dora's mother died in February 1874, six days after giving birth to Dora, after which her father worked for many years as a missionary in Melanesia. In 1895 Dora's father remarried, and Dora's stepmother was a friend of Caroline Alice Elgar. In July 1897 the Penny family invited Edward and Alice Elgar to stay at the Wolverhampton Rectory for a few days. Edwa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the ''Enigma Variations'', the ''Pomp and Circumstance Marches'', concertos for Violin Concerto (Elgar), violin and Cello Concerto (Elgar), cello, and two symphony, symphonies. He also composed choral works, including ''The Dream of Gerontius'', chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-consci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Caroline Alice Elgar
Caroline Alice, Lady Elgar (9 October 18487 April 1920) was an English author of verse and prose fiction, who married the composer Edward Elgar. Family Caroline Alice Roberts, known as Alice, was born in Bhuj, Gujarat, India, in 1848. She was the youngest child (having three elder brothers) and only daughter of Major-General Sir Henry Gee Roberts KCB (1800–1860), and Julia Maria (1815–1887), daughter of Rev. Robert Napier Raikes (1783-1851). Alice's great-grandfather Robert Raikes (1736–1811) was the founder of the Sunday school movement, and her uncle was British Indian Army General Robert Napier Raikes (1813–1909). Her father was serving in India at the time of the Indian Mutiny, and he died when Alice was aged only 12. As a girl she studied with the amateur geologist Rev W. S. Symonds and they and a group of her friends went fossil-hunting on the banks of the river Severn.Powell, p. 1. She wrote the index to a book by him. She studied the piano with Ferdinand Kuff ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Enigma Variations
Edward Elgar composed his ''Variations on an Original Theme'', Op. 36, popularly known as the ''Enigma Variations'', between October 1898 and February 1899. It is an orchestral work comprising fourteen variations on an original theme. Elgar dedicated the work "to my friends pictured within", each variation being a musical sketch of one of his circle of close acquaintances (see musical cryptogram). Those portrayed include Elgar's wife Alice, his friend and publisher Augustus J. Jaeger and Elgar himself. In a programme note for a performance in 1911 Elgar wrote: In naming his theme "Enigma", Elgar posed a challenge which has generated much speculation but has never been conclusively answered. The Enigma is widely believed to involve a hidden melody. After its 1899 London premiere the ''Variations'' achieved immediate popularity and established Elgar's international reputation. History Elgar described how on the evening of 21 October 1898, after a tiring day's teaching, h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Methuen Publishing
Methuen Publishing Ltd is an English publishing house. It was founded in 1889 by Sir Algernon Methuen (1856–1924) and began publishing in London in 1892. Initially Methuen mainly published non-fiction academic works, eventually diversifying to encourage female authors and later translated works. E. V. Lucas headed the firm from 1924 to 1938. Establishment In June 1889, as a sideline to teaching, Algernon Methuen began to publish and market his own textbooks under the label Methuen & Co. The company's first success came in 1892 with the publication of Rudyard Kipling's ''Barrack-Room Ballads''. Rapid growth came with works by Marie Corelli, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde ('' De Profundis'', 1905) as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ''Tarzan of the Apes''.Stevenson, page 59. In 1910 the business was converted into a limited liability company with E. V. Lucas and G.E. Webster joining the founder on the board of directors. The company published the 1920 En ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nihilist Cipher
In the history of cryptography, the Nihilist cipher is a manually operated symmetric encryption cipher, originally used by Russian Nihilists in the 1880s to organize terrorism against the tsarist regime. The term is sometimes extended to several improved algorithms used much later for communication by the First Chief Directorate with its spies. Description First the encipherer constructs a Polybius square using a mixed alphabet. This is used to convert both the plaintext and a keyword to a series of two digit numbers. These numbers are then added together in the normal way to get the ciphertext, with the key numbers repeated as required. Example Consider the Polybius square created using the keyword ZEBRAS: with a plaintext of "DYNAMITE WINTER PALACE" and a key of RUSSIAN. This expands to: PT: 23 55 41 15 35 32 45 12 53 32 41 45 12 14 43 15 34 15 22 12 KEY: 14 51 21 21 32 15 41 14 51 21 21 32 15 41 14 51 21 21 32 15 CT: 37 106 62 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eric Sams
Eric Sams (3 May 1926 – 13 September 2004) was a British musicologist and Shakespeare scholar. Life Born in London, Sams was raised in Essex. His early brilliance in school (Westcliff High School for Boys) earned him a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, at the age of sixteen. His lifelong passion for puzzles and ciphers stood him in good stead in his wartime service in British Intelligence (1944–47). After the war he read Modern Languages at Cambridge (French and German), 1947–50; upon graduation he entered the Civil Service. In 1952 he married Enid Tidmarsh (died 2002), a pianist. Their elder son, Richard, is a Japanese scholar and chess master working in Tokyo; their younger son Jeremy Sams is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and theatre director. Musicology In music, Sams wrote on and studied a range of subjects and genres, though his specialty was German lieder. He wrote volumes on the songs of Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. His t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scale (music)
In music theory, a scale is any set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch. A scale ordered by increasing pitch is an ascending scale, and a scale ordered by decreasing pitch is a descending scale. Often, especially in the context of the common practice period, most or all of the melody and harmony of a musical work is built using the notes of a single scale, which can be conveniently represented on a staff with a standard key signature. Due to the principle of octave equivalence, scales are generally considered to span a single octave, with higher or lower octaves simply repeating the pattern. A musical scale represents a division of the octave space into a certain number of scale steps, a scale step being the recognizable distance (or interval) between two successive notes of the scale. However, there is no need for scale steps to be equal within any scale and, particularly as demonstrated by microtonal music, there is no limit to how many notes can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plaintext
In cryptography, plaintext usually means unencrypted information pending input into cryptographic algorithms, usually encryption algorithms. This usually refers to data that is transmitted or stored unencrypted. Overview With the advent of computing, the term ''plaintext'' expanded beyond human-readable documents to mean any data, including binary files, in a form that can be viewed or used without requiring a key or other decryption device. Information—a message, document, file, etc.—if to be communicated or stored in an unencrypted form is referred to as plaintext. Plaintext is used as input to an encryption algorithm; the output is usually termed ciphertext, particularly when the algorithm is a cipher. Codetext is less often used, and almost always only when the algorithm involved is actually a code. Some systems use multiple layers of encryption, with the output of one encryption algorithm becoming "plaintext" input for the next. Secure handling Insecure handling of p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Musical Opinion
''Musical Opinion'', often abbreviated to ''MO'', is a European classical music journal edited and produced in the UK. It is currently among the oldest such journals to be still publishing in the UK, having been continuously in publication since 1877. In its first year ''Musical Opinion'' critically reviewed Brahms' new Second Symphony, and in 1879 his Violin Concerto. The October 1936 issue carried an interview with Rachmaninov and championed the young William Walton as Britain's most exciting young composer. In 1927, when the editor and proprietor was Arthur W. Fitzsimmons (d. 1948), the composer Havergal Brian became assistant editor of ''Musical Opinion''. He held the post until 1940. This period could be said to have been its heyday: it was then a leading journal in its field, with each issue comprising over 100 large-format pages and a wide range of subject-matter (including much contemporary music) being covered by some of the most prominent British writers on music of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conductor's Baton
A baton is a stick that is used by conductors primarily to enlarge and enhance the manual and bodily movements associated with directing an ensemble of musicians. Description Modern batons are generally made of a lightweight wood, fiberglass or carbon fiber which is tapered to a comfortable grip called a "bulb" that is usually made of cork, oak, walnut, rosewood, or occasionally aluminium and that may be tailored to a conductor's needs. Professional conductors often have personal specifications for a baton based on their own physical demands and the nature of the performance: Sir Henry Wood and Herbert von Karajan are some examples. Historic examples of their construction include one given to the French composer Louis-Antoine Jullien in the mid 1850s prior to his first visit to the United States: it is described as "a gorgeous baton made of maplewood, richly mounted in gold and set with costly diamonds." Batons have normally varied in length from about though a range of betwee ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elgar Society
The Elgar Society was founded in 1951 to promote performance of the music of British composer Edward Elgar, especially the more rarely performed items. Registered as a charity on 22 January 1988, It is particularly concerned with introducing the composer and his music to younger audiences and, by making grants to appropriate educational activities, to enhance the quality of life of members of the public. It also supports the Elgar Birthplace Museum with an annual grant with the objective of widening accessibility to the location and its contents and encouraging research. In the 1980s the Society encouraged the making of recordings of works such as ''The Black Knight'' which remained unrecorded. Organization The current president of the Elgar society is Sir Mark Elder. Previous presidents were Sir Adrian Boult from 1951, Lord Menuhin from 1983 and Richard Hickox from 1999. There are seven UK Branches organised geographically: Great Western, London, North West, Scotland, Southern ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
