Prizes and Puzzles!

Do you ever wonder whether anyone is actually listening to what you say? I do. And I think I have reason.

In the liner notes to our 2024 album, Old World, New World, I posed several puzzling questions. I admit that a few of them were rhetorical, and some were inherently unanswerable—but many were intended as provocative puzzles. I had hoped people would respond to the challenge. No one has.

As a reminder, here are the two challenging historical questions that actually have specific answers:

• Which side of a mountain fortress should you attack when starting a revolution?
  Ioannis Papakalomiris faced that question as he marched his troops from Vordonia to Mistras in March of 1821. What did he do?
• What sort of 1965 journey did a famous composer named Johnny tell us about (which inspired my song, Johnny’s Journey)? Who is that Johnny, and what song did he write about such a journey?

As a trained economist (in my other life), I am keenly aware of incentives. And as an ignored puzzle master, I yearn for attention. So here’s the deal: if you are the first to answer either of these questions—even somewhat correctly—by emailing me at cc374@columbia.edu, you will win a prize: two free tickets to either the March 20 or March 21, 2026 Pano Hora Ensemble Double World Premiere Concert at Merkin Hall in New York City.

To learn more about that concert, please visit the blog entry about it on the blog page at panohoraensemble.com/blog.

Some helpful hints:
To answer the second puzzle, it might help to listen to Johnny’s Journey.
To answer the first, consider how it feels to be fired upon by cannons.

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