Der Teufel hat das Spiel erdacht 

"Musical Games" is a 60-minute programme which explores witty allusions to "play" between composer, performer and audience. The opening set includes several examples of medieval and renaissance canons. Literally meaning "rule", a canon requires a composer to follow a strict rule to imitate or manipulate a melodic line. In Guillaume de Machaut’s masterful motet "Ma fin est mon commencement", the tenor line reverses half-way through the piece, giving an exact mirror copy so that the final note is the same as the first. In a 16^th-century Scottish canon, "The Nyntene Canon", both lines are the same, but the lower one is played half as fast. The clever "Puzzle Canon", from a manuscript of Henry VIII’s time, places three voices in strict imitation; the instructions tell us "thys songe is iij parts in one and eche part begynnyth under the other..."

Pieter Flötner’s playing cards, likely produced in the 1540s and now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, contain handwritten music on the backs of the cards. The four musical voices are assigned to the four suits, so that Herz = discantus, Schellen = altus, Laub = tenor and Eichel = bassus. In all, we have twelve songs: one for each rank of playing card, from Daus up to König. The songs are typical Tenorlieder, but scholars find difficulty in identifying specific composers. Indeed, the songs may have been composed especially for the playing cards. Imagine a playing-card session in a German noble household turning into a musical party!

A suite of five settings of Japanese waka texts concludes the concert. Written for Quadrivium by Belgian composer Janpieter Biesemans, the lyrics, from the "Hyakunin-isshu" or "100 poems by 100 poets", are also found on playing cards in the beautiful uta garuta packs. The pieces examine different states of love: the joy of newly discovered love; parting at dawn; absence of the beloved; doubting faithfulness; and rueful grief. Although Biesemans has scored the suite for western medieval instruments, his compositions capture the delicate yet intense character of Japanese traditional music.