Quaerendo Invenietis: Patrick Gowers’s Sherlockian Puzzle

When Granada Television contracted the British composer Patrick Gowers to provide the accompanying score for itsSherlock Holmes series(1984–89), he opted to insert into his music “a puzzle that only Sherlock himself would immediately recognize and solve.” An exhaustive analysis of its forty-one programs, which takes into consideration the origin and derivation of their thematic material, the identification of paraphrased or disguised masterpieces, various ethnic and/or historical influences, as well as a catalogue of literal quotations from other works, provides a trail of tantalizing clues (including Gowers’ own planting of the cryptic phrase “Quaerendo invenietis” in his 1987 LP recording), whose eventual solution leads to Bach’sMusical Offering.