No I haven’t suddenly taken to designing embroidery patterns for Romanian shirts. I used this old toy I found in the basement to show you how the player of the double-wholetone-row xylophone or wholetone panpipe player visualizes Messiaen’s seven “modes of limited transposition” – plus the augmented scale that he left out, tripping along the bottom of the image.

Maybe she is Snow White, or maybe, since she was left out, Cinderella.

As for the dwarfs, you will recall they are named Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy and Grumpy. So please have a think about which name corresponds to which mode and let me know your views in a comment.

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