Tortoiseshell Music Home of composer Nathan Curtis

Apologies once again for the long silence. Fortunately, I'm doing much better than I was when I wrote my last post, both emotionally and musically. In fact, I am putting the finishing touches on a 15-minute work for concert band, tentatively titled Siren Fantasy. I started right around Thanksgiving, arrived at a double bar a few days ago, and will be editing like mad shortly. I hope to get it wrapped up by the end of the month, and if I'm lucky, get a performance by the end of the semester. After having made many abortive attempts at writing for band, I'm very excited to have this one under my belt.

But for now, I am too busy to savor that feeling. I have been gearing up for the MIT Mystery Hunt, which starts tomorrow, and today I have a lot of packing to do. Puzzles are perhaps my greatest vice, and the Mystery Hunt is a weekend-long all-you-can-solve buffet of 100 or more delightfully difficult puzzles, perfect for a junkie like me. My team, Just for the Halibut, is in no danger of winning -- rather fortunately, as the winning team must then write the next year's Hunt -- but we have a lot of fun nonetheless.

The puzzles at the Mystery Hunt run the gamut from crosswords to logic puzzles to trivia to everything in between, including a fair number of music-related puzzles. Most music puzzles are centered around pop song identification, which I leave to my teammates, but there have been a few puzzles that skewed more towards my areas of expertise:

• Go Bye-Bye, Whinging Muchacha! is a neat little puzzle from 2002, the year before I started Hunting. It hinges on recognizing a particular thing, but that thing is reasonably well known in the classical music world. The answer to this puzzle is a single word.
• Stairway to Heaven is a puzzle from 2003 which draws on a good deal of musical trivia. The final solution -- which is not a word but an object or image -- hinges on knowledge of the MIT campus, but the relevant information can be found from within this virtual tour.
• Having Fun, from 2004, is the only jazz-themed puzzle that I can think of. I single-handedly nailed that one, making my team one of only three to get it. I will say that I found the clue phrase very frustrating and misleading -- at one point the organizers informed me that the last word of the clue should be "TITLE," instead of what was given -- but the two-word answer is certainly apropos for the title.
• Concerto Delle Oche Volanti eluded me in 2005 -- I assumed the puzzle involved much more sophisticated musical knowledge than was actually required. I have an unfortunate tendency to overthink puzzles with simpler mechanics sometimes.

If I ever get to help write the Mystery Hunt, I have some ideas for music-related puzzles I'd like to try, but I have to show some restraint. While I could easily write a 12-tone composition which encodes the letters of the answer in the different row operations, I can't imagine that being fun to solve for most teams. But I have other tricks up my sleeve...

In any event, I should go finish packing. And don't be surprised if I wind up gushing about the Mystery Hunt sometime next week. And yes, I will try to write about music, too.