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By Greg Pliska and Guy Jacobson
Answer: WE DON’T TOOT OUR OWN HORNS

Each of the seven tunes played by the minstrels is in a different musical mode (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, and so forth). There is a canonical order for the modes, which gives the ordering for the seven answers. In each piece of music, the finger cymbal plays three times, each time along with a specific note of the melody. Each of these notes is a numbered scale step in the mode played, so the cymbals identify three numbers in order. These three numbers are used to index into the seven-letter answer word. The extracted trigrams, placed in canonical mode order, spell a message when read down along the columns. That message is WE DON'T TOOT OUR OWN HORNS. Clues to the mechanism include the word “MODEst” and (more pointedly) the “pie with ice cream” (à la mode). The “woman playing the finger cymbals” is identified as the person who will “tell you what you want to know.”

OrderModeCymbal OrderAnswer
1 Ionian 267 SWALLOW W O W
2 Dorian 152 ENTROPY E O N
3 Phrygian 361 HYDRATE D T H
4 Lydian 742 MOROCCO O O O
5 Mixolydian 437 THUNDER N U R
6 Aeolian 517 RIGHT ON T R N
7 Locrian 625 JOCASTA T O S