Sigismund Neukomm’s Eight-voice Enigmatic Canon, Rio de Janeiro, 1821. Assembling and Disassembling an Enigma

Abstract

This article aims to reconstitute a musical enigma that Sigismund Neukomm
designed in Brazil in the early nineteenth century. The enigma, when solved, gives
rise to an eight-voice canon. This involves the reconstitution of the document (quite
puzzling in itself) which contains the enigma, of the full score of the worked-out
canon and finally of the context in which the enigma was designed. Having
established these points, the article then proceeds to disassemble both the original
document, so as to better understand its historical context, and the canon itself, so as
to identify and understand the compositional process. The canon, with eight voices
at the distance of a third, contains seven canonic lines each of which is melodically
distinct.