Abstract: Anamorphosis is a term for visual art designed to be viewed obliquely or examined through various corrective devices. This essay compares canons and musical riddles with anamorphosis, and in doing so proposes new ways to think about the activity and experience of the musical practitioner.

1. Anamorphic paintings are interactive, requiring a viewer to complete them—in other words, they are performed. In a similar way, musical encryptions pose an instructive element, which is seen but not heard. In this way both arts hover between the plastic and performative.

2. Perspectival shift is used to rectify distorted anamorphic material; the resolution of musical encryptions simulate this procedure in auditory form. Both reveal unseen aspects of the work by prompting the practitioner to change what—and how—they see, and in the process tap into a rhetoric about revealing through perspectival shift.

3. Anamorphic paintings lean on linear perspective for their artistic aims; musical encryptions make similar use of the notational system itself. In stretching systems of representation to their limits—where they cease to represent—they reveal a transformative potential that has been lurking under the surface all along. Both are extreme examples of subversive tendencies already present in their respective arts.

Anamorphosis and musical encryptions conscript the viewer / musician in a transformative search for hidden meanings. They offer up a situation in which one entity is likened to another through playful distortions and transformations, and in doing so they reflect a larger impulse to seek out likenesses and similitudes. Whether such puzzles are better classified as a game or as epistemology, they reveal a way of interacting with the unknown, and with its connection to the known.

(coming soon…)