I spent almost no time during my recent vacation listening to music. A little Wagner and Handel on the airplane, in keeping with a long-standing habit that has now hardened into ritual, but otherwise nothing.

Instead, my every free moment was devoted tosolving puzzles. Crosswords, logic puzzles, arcane sudoku variants, double-crostics — an array of stumpers and enigmas of all shapes and sizes.

This was, in a certain way, no different from everyday life. When I’m not attending concerts around the Bay Area or writing about them for The Chronicle, much of my time is spent immersed in some puzzle or other. They live on an enormous clipboard where they accumulate by the dozens, often more rapidly than I can solve and recycle them.

But this month was different. For the first time since before the onset of the pandemic, I was once again able to attend the annual convention of theNational Puzzlers’ League, a hobbyist group that bills itself as the world’s oldest organization for puzzle enthusiasts (founded in 1883).

In the same way that attending the opera or the symphony puts me in the company of other people for whom music is central (along with plenty of novices we’re trying to persuade), the puzzlers’ convention provides time among my fellow obsessives — the ones for whom any word or string of letters is a reflexive prompt to start thinking up anagrams.

In the musical world, I’m probably regarded as the guy with the weird and somewhat off-topic hobby, and I’m not sure what the puzzler crowd thinks about my job (although many of them do share a love of music). But from inside, where these twin passions share space in my brain, the connections feel pretty clear.

It’s not just the standard cultural trope linking predilections for music, language and math, although that is certainly part of it. A look around the hotel ballroom during the puzzlers’ convention would have turned up a preponderance of folks with professional or avocational interests in all those areas.

But the linkage between music and puzzles (word puzzles in particular) feels especially profound. Both are concerned with the formal arrangement of discrete elements — letters and words in one case, notes in the other. These elements then combine in ever larger and more elaborate patterns, creating shapes that can be both familiar and strange.

音乐的相似之处尤为明显operates according to strictly established rules of construction, such as the Baroque fugues of which J.S. Bach was famously a master. These are extravagantly constrained creations, in which individual vocal or instrumental lines are combined according to painstaking guidelines that govern harmony, counterpoint and so forth.

One of the things that makes Bach’s fugues so awe-inspiring is the fluency with which he operated within those guidelines to write music of beauty, complexity and grace. He also understood how and when to push against the limits of the rulebook in order to explore further expressive possibilities.

That’s perhaps the most extreme example, but there are others. During the late Renaissance, composers such as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina forged a musical language for sacred vocal music that used certain constructive principles (which dissonant intervals were allowed, for instance, and under what circumstances) to create works of remarkable polish.

Crossword puzzles are a different animal, obviously, but they can operate along similar lines. Putting one together is a matter of plotting out the territory, establishing the key structural points, and then finagling and erasing until all the pieces fit together.

This analogy was driven home to me many years ago, when I was a graduate student in the UC Berkeley music department. As the final project in a seminar on 17th century music, the professor gave us the manuscript of a six-part vocal piece from which two parts had been lost, and told us to reconstruct the absent vocal lines based on the rules of counterpoint.

I didn’t know much about 17th century musical style, but assembling the missing pieces of a puzzle — which is what this assignment amounted to — was a cakewalk. The professor, a notoriously tough grader, gave me a rare A, which could not possibly have been based on my mediocre performance during the rest of the semester. Kids, never let anyone tell you that too many crosswords will mess up your GPA.

Probably the most overt embodiment of the puzzle-music duality was the lateStephen Sondheim, whose musical theater works sparkle with an ingenuity and elegance that every puzzle aficionado recognizes intuitively. (That’s also what leads his detractors to call them “sterile” or “overly clever.”)

It wasSondheim, during his 1960s stint creating crosswords for the then-fledgling New York Magazine, who helped popularize the British cultural import now referred to as “cryptic crosswords.” In both his lyrics and his music, Sondheim reveled in the possibilities of joining and rearranging interlocking fragments, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

And if the aesthetic framework of puzzling can carry over into music, the reverse is also true. Among the pleasures of solving a lot of puzzles is learning to recognize the creative voices of particular constructors, which can be as distinctive and personalized as those of a composer or poet.

There areconstructorswhose skill and imagination make them the Bach or Palestrina of a crossword grid, and seeing one of those names on a puzzle can make a solver’s heart race a little faster in anticipation.

For a long time, I felt slightly odd about being so completely devoted to these two pastimes. Then in 2017, the great character actor哈利迪斯坦顿died at the age of 91, and his great-niece gave an unforgettable quote to the New York Times.

Her great-uncle never really cared that much about the movies, she said. “His passions in life were music and the crossword puzzle.”

You and me both, Harry Dean. You and me both.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman