Prompt: This week’s contest answer is a noted work of art.
Answer: Bach’s MASS IN B MINOR
Correct entries: 115
Week 3? More like Week 5. Meta difficulty often balances on a knife’s edge, and this puzzle could’ve been much easier (and much better-received by solvers) with a minor adjustment or two. As it was, it fell pretty flat due to one problematic step, which is a pity since I think the core idea was nice. Let’s take a look at what went wrong-ish (and what might have been).
Four 12-letter entries, which looked to be (and indeed were) theme:
20-A: [Point-conceding phrase] = I HAVE TO ADMIT
27-A: [It’s perfect for picky eaters] = A LA CARTE MENU
47-A: [One of fewer than a dozen left in the U.S. (there used to be over 800)] =TOYS “R” US STORE
55-A: [Fills out, as a ballot] = MARKS WITH AN X
First insight: each of these four is comprised of a four-word phrase who words are 1, 2, 4, and 5 letters in length. That’s probably not a coincidence. But what next?
Second insight: well, our title is “Missing Pieces,” and the missing piece from these entries is a three-letter word. So maybe the three-letter entries in the grid are important, and the first thing we notice is that there are very few of them: just 8, which is extremely low for a 15×15 grid.
Let’s write these eight out in grid order:
ETA ASS MAS SIN BMI NOR AGO ILL
Third and final insight: if you read off the central four of those you’ve got Bach’s MASS IN B MINOR, which is another example of the 1-2-4-5 pattern and our contest answer, found by 115 solvers.
So what was the problem? The first two steps were nice, but the third raised objections: Why those four? Why are we only using four of the eight 3-letter entries? Why don’t the 3-letter entries each correspond to a specific theme entry?
Tactically, I didn’t want to have just four 3-letter entries in the grid (MAS SIN BMI NOR) since then someone could short-circuit the meta by just reading these four off right away. So I thought they needed to be hidden among other 3’s, but I underestimated the difficulty of spotting Mass in B Minor even once you had the idea. A number of solvers reported having written their eight trigrams down, in proper order, and still not seeing it; tough to parse, since, for example, the two threes in row 8 (SIN BMI) look like gibberish at first glance.
But still, taking only the central four of the eight 3’s does seem a bit random, and a number of solvers sent a note along the lines of “It has to be MASS IN B MINOR, but why use these four 3’s and not the others?” I think I could have solved this by using one of my title ideas, which was “Missing (Center)Piece”. This is unwieldy and clouds the wordplay of “piece” as “piece of music,” which is why I rejected it. I figured that solvers who didn’t make the “center four” connection would still have a 100% click once seeing MASS IN B MINOR, and would interpret it as a message hidden among the noise of a couple of 3’s on either side of it. But that turned out to be confusing, so I should probably have gone with the “Missing (Center)Piece” title to provide a more concrete explanation for only using four of the eight.
Some examples of the got-it-but-hmm doubt:
Jonesy:
i feel like i might be missing something but it’s too perfect not to be right… Can’t figure out why there are extra three letter entries (ETA, ASS, AGO, ILL) or if there’s something else that confirms.
JanglerNPL:
I mean, it’s gotta be, but why those 3s in particular? Is MAS somehow “missing” from I TO ___ HAVE ADMIT?
RPardoe:
I am stopping and hoping this is it. I saw the three letter words were missing and the grid has relatively few (only 8). At this point nothing told me that I might use only half of the available three letter entries. So I ignored them as I didn’t see a way to use them as I was trying to use any and all of them. I kept coming back as a week 3 shouldn’t be that convoluted a solve. While trying to find words using pairs of three letter words, I was writing them in pairs on a piece of paper. It was BMI + NOR for BMINOR – AHA that finally made me see the method. Got MASS IN, but then struggled what to do with the other 4 three-letter entries. I also noticed the answer is a “fifth theme” with its own 1,2, 4,5 pattern, so calling it a night and submitting. But not the hard click I usually expect.
This is far from ideal — more of an “Aha?” moment than an “Aha!” moment. So while no solver used the word “unfair,” I should have used the more informative title. “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been!”
On a happier note, golod writes, while submitting the correct answer:
I was listening to this earlier today, I kid you not. Netherlands Bach Society…check it out on YouTube. I like “noted.”
Onward and upward…
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a familiar 5-letter proper noun.