This month’s MMMM, “Dynamic Duos,” lived up to November difficulty with only two people solving correctly in the first three hours (JanglerNPL in 28 minutes followed by thanman2 in 1 hour and 17 minutes). The puzzle’s title refers to musical dynamic markings — specifically those that are two letters long. In increasing order of volume, the four such markings are pp (pianissimo), mp (mezzo piano), mf (mezzo forte), and ff (fortissimo).

Each of these markings appears vertically in the grid two times, as indicated by the purple shading in the image. The pairs of letters to the right of these markings spell out, in order from left to right (also in order of increasing volume), L-I-S-T-E-N-T-O-T-H-E-M-U-S-I-C, yielding this month’s meta answer, the Doobie Brothers classic Listen to the Music.

Meta Song:

I was lucky enough to spend some time in Nashville at the legendary RCA Studio A and was joined by my friend Mary Bragg and an all-star band to record this month’s cover. Enjoy!

Selected Solver Comments:

DeanP   Hardest one this year.

ryoustra   A brilliant concept with a delightfully deceptive title… kudos!

Katiedid   At first, I saw the dynamics in a clockwise circle, in a nice crescendo-decrescendo. That seemed perfect except that I couldn’t figure out what to do with it!

maddy   I have never heard of mp and mf (I knew p, pp, ppp, f, f, fff) and would never have gotten near a solution without some team solving…

Jwaan   Got it! Sing it loud! (and soft) … I would NEVER have seen what it was without stopping to think a bit more about the puzzle title!

Alternative Music Clues:

xtina suggests cluing FCC as [It won’t let Eminem be, per his song “Without Me”].

Cruciverbalicious suggests cluing IT’S FUN as [How the Village People feel about a YMCA stay].

Evan suggests cluing MATH as [Field of expertise for Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (and Tom Lehrer, who sang about him in “Lobachevsky”)], AMIN as [“Voice of Sudan” musician Mohammed al ___], and ISLES as [Fleet Foxes song whose title refers to a group of landforms with “silver” shores].

Groaners:

mattyx   iMPpressive but MF difficult! Who knew such things? In the end I am haPPy

Mikey G   I thought I would need the across entries for this, but that’s what a fool believes!

Bird Lives   I wanted to write my answer starting with small letters that gradually get larger as we go from pianissimo through the mezzos to fortissimo. But that was not technically possible.

sharkicicles   This one was a MF!   

Gwinns   Whoa-ho-HOOOOOOOOO

Totals this month:

117 correct, 32 incorrect

Rating: 3.98 out of 5 stars

Difficulty: 4.43 out of 5

Monthly mug winner: Fred Kelly from Plainsboro, NJ

Thanks to Matt Gaffney for blogging the puzzle at Crossword Fiend, where you can rate the puzzle (thanks!) and/or leave a comment.

Thanks to Tamara Brenner for the graphic.

Thanks for playing and see you next month!