Melody Medley

[Confirm any that they do have, and help out with others. Try not to give them directly—see other hints for how I've phrased some particularly salient works—but if they aren't having fun with it feel free to give a direct name.]

This is / a symphony / of Schubert's that is rather well-known; / but in / particular, / it has a special quality / for which it has been named.

Does something sound off about the other pieces in this section?

The flavortext specifies that the qualities of the original works are important.

Mahler's symphonies have endured in the repertoire—Bernstein made sure of it. This is an excerpt from one of them, though it's not named as such: Mahler never gave it a number out of superstition.

Is there a theme you've noticed among the titles of the pieces you've identified? This may help you find others.

Two pieces play simultaneously at any given instant. How might you represent that?

There are some extra notes highlighted in blue at the end, and we still haven't used the C. P. E. Bach work yet. Maybe they can help find an extraction mechanism. But "FSud" isn't a composer I know of… maybe that three-note sequence is something else entirely?

C. P. E. Bach was about as prolific as his father, but no work of his is more well-known than this one.

Try reading that three-note sequence in solfège (fixed-do, as the French or Italians do).

Solresol can be notated with any set of 7 things, not just solfège. More common ones include colors and hand signals, to name a few—but there's also a system hinted at by the marks on that final sequence of blue notes.

Stravinsky's known for playing around with rhythm. There's one piece in particular that acts a bit like the current situation (though certainly more orderly than it is now)...

The time signatures in this piece sure are wild—almost nobody uses 20/16, for instance. Is it encoding something else?

There's seven pieces in this section (we're ignoring the Stravinsky for this); obviously this piece's time signatures are unreliable for this segment, so what can we use instead? (Note that one work will work slightly differently from the others.)

Bach's repertoire is enormous—a whole eight pieces form the hint for this section! They're all from the same collection, though. Given the other pieces in this section are all from a particular instrument's repertoire, one collection might stand out—its first work is particularly well-known.

There's another few blue symbols near the start of the section. Together, they indicate a mechanism.

The key is in the keys, so to speak—or rather, the difference between the keys. Transpositionally speaking, not in terms of flats and sharps. The result should have nine notes.

You might note a "first" on one of the Bach annotations. Many composers would arrange a collection like this with the Circle of Fifths. Bach, on the other hand…

One work of Gershwin's is particularly famous as a portrait of American music of the time. This is a rendition of its coda; you might know it better from its opening.

The blue notes in the bassline look interesting. Give those a look… or perhaps not?

The puzzle also involves a different type of dot-based tactile script. Maybe one relevant to Rhapsody in Blue's reputation...

The coda of Rhapsody in Blue uses full chords of four notes. Here, only some of the middle notes are transcribed; how could that encode a tactile script?

You may want to rethink that assumption. :)

The melodies in the M section are all from one body of work; you may recognize the upper melody in Section M2 as particularly famous. You might also reference the header here: why is this work subtitled "A Musical Enigma"? Why is there a dedication "to my friends pictured within"?

There's enough variation in the melodies and rhythms to distinguish between the main themes and the variations. Variation 4, for instance, lacks the rests of the main theme (while the main theme playing in its section keeps the rests and shortens it elsewhere to fit in ¾ time).

For once, it's a mortal inspiring Apollo, and not the other way around. He's even given them an acknowledgement in the endcard, though it seems to be blank right now…

There's some red notation scattered throughout the work—exactly 12 symbols, in fact, enough to fit the enumeration in the endcard, and the first is a treble clef. Maybe they spell something?

The dedication should be filled in with a name. Those down-facing quarter notes don't really look like Is—the way the head is attached makes it resemble a different letter (albeit lowercase).

Does anything sound familiar in the mashups? Keep in mind that they follow the same rules—the tempo, rhythm, and key might be fudged around to fit the context, but the contour is always the same.

Note that the answers are specifically a section of their larger work. Why?

Can you relate the structure of sections M1-5 to the parts of the mashups you found? If it helps, there's one standard Enigma theme in each section M1-5—a musical question mark, if you will.

The names of pieces can be rather inexact at times—you won't need to extract from those. There's a string that's both more compelling and more consistently spelled. (And even where it's inconsistent, you have a source to draw from now.)

The new works in each section M1-5 are always played simultaneously—one on top of the other. Consider a grand staff, and arrange your extraction accordingly—something clearer should pop out.